The birth of tragedy, or Hellenism and pessimism

FROM-THE LIBRARY OF
TWNITYCOLLEGE TORONTO

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

T&e First Complete and Authorised English Translation

EDITED BY

DR OSCAR LEVY

VOLUME ONK

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

First Edition 1500 Copies

Second Edition 1500 Copies

Third Edition published May 1923

2500 Copies

of which this is

No.

5.15

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
THE

BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

OR
HELLENISM AND PESSIMISM

TRANSLATED BY

WM. A. HAUSSMANN, PH.D.

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN W UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

D

First published in English 1909

reserved]

I'rinted in Great Britain by

THE KUINBUKC.H 1'KESS, EDINIIUKCH

CONTENTS.

PAGE

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION • vii

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM - - i

FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER - 19

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY - - 21

INTRODUCTION.*

FREDERICK NIETZSCHE was born at Rocken near
Ltitzen, in the Prussian province of Saxony, on
the i 5th of October 1844, at 10 a.m. The day
happened to be the anniversary of the birth of
Frederick-William IV., then King of Prussia, and
the peal of the local church-bells which was intended
to celebrate this event, was, by a happy coincidence,
just timed to greet my brother on his entrance into
the world. In 1 84 1 , at the time when our fatherwas
tutor to the Altenburg Princesses, Theresa of Saxe-
Altenburg, Elizabeth, Grand Duchess of Olden
burg, and Alexandra, Grand Duchess Constantine
of Russia, he had had the honour of being presented
to his witty and pious sovereign. The meeting
seems to have impressed both parties very favour
ably ; for, very shortly after it had taken place, our
father received his living at Rocken " by supreme
command." His joy may well be imagined, there
fore, when a first son was born to him on his beloved

* This Introduction by E. Forster-Nietzsche, which appears
in the front of the first volume of Naumann's Pocket Edition of
Nietzsche, has been translated and arranged by Mr. A. M.
LudovicL

Vlll INTRODUCTION.

and august patron's birthday, and at the christening
ceremony he spoke as follows : — " Thou blessed
month of October ! — for many years the most
decisive events in my life have occurred within thy
thirty-one days, and now I celebrate the greatest
and most glorious of them all by baptising my
little boy ! O blissful moment ! O exquisite
festival ! O unspeakably holy duty ! In the
Lord's name I bless thee ! — With all my heart
I utter these words : Bring me this, my beloved
child, that I may consecrate it unto the Lord.
My son, Frederick William, thus shalt thou be
named on earth, as a memento of my royal
benefactor on whose birthday thou wast born ! "

Our father was thirty-one years of age, and our
mother not quite nineteen, when my brother was
born. Our mother, who was the daughter of a
clergyman, was good-looking and healthy, and was
one of a very large family of sons and daughters.
Our paternal grandparents, the Rev. Oehler and
his wife, in Pobles, were typically healthy people.
Strength, robustness, lively dispositions, and a
cheerful outlook on life, were among the qualities
which every one was pleased to observe in them.
Our grandfather Oehler was a bright, clever man,
and quite the old style of comfortable country
parson, who thought it no sin to go hunting.
He scarcely had a day's illness in his life, and would
certainly not have met with his end as early as he
did — that is to say, before his seventieth year — if
his careless disregard of all caution, where his
health was concerned, had not led to his catching
a severe and fatal cold. In regard to our grand-

INTRODUCTION. ix

mother Oehler, who died in her eighty-second year,
all that can be said is, that if all German women
were possessed of the health she enjoyed, the
German nation would excel all others from the
standpoint of vitality. She bore our grandfather
eleven children ; gave each of them the breast for
nearly the whole of its first year, and reared them
all. It is said that the sight of these eleven
children, at ages varying from nineteen years to one
month, with their powerful build, rosy cheeks, beam
ing eyes, and wealth of curly locks, provoked the
admiration of all visitors. Of course, despite their
extraordinarily good health, the life of this family
was not by any means all sunshine. Each of the
children was very spirited, wilful, and obstinate, and
it was therefore no simple matter to keep them in
order. Moreover, though they always showed the
utmost respect and most implicit obedience to their
parents — even as middle-aged men and women —
misunderstandings between themselves were of con
stant occurrence. Our Oehler grandparents were
fairly well-to-do ; for our grandmother hailed from
a very old family, who had been extensive land
owners in the neighbourhood of Zeitz for centuries,
and her father owned the baronial estate of Wehlitz
and a magnificent seat near Zeitz in Pacht. When
she married, her father gave her carriages and
horses, a coachman, a cook, and a kitchenmaid,
which for the wife of a German minister was then,
and is still, something quite exceptional. As a
result of the wars in the beginning of the nine
teenth century, however, our great-grandfather
lost the greater part of his property.

X INTRODUCTION.

Our father's family was also in fairly comfortable
circumstances, and likewise very large. Our grand
father Dr. Nietzsche (D.D. and Superintendent)
married twice, and had in all twelve children, of
whom three died young. Our grandfather on this
side, whom I never knew, must certainly have been
a distinguished, dignified, very learned and reserved
man; his second wife — our beloved grandmother —
was an active-minded, intelligent, and exceptionally
good-natured woman. The whole of our father's
family, which I only got to know when they were
very advanced in years, were remarkable for their
great power of self-control, their lively interest in
intellectual matters, and a strong sense of family
unity, which manifested itself both in their splen
did readiness to help one another and in their very
excellent relations with each other. Our father
was the youngest son, and, thanks to his un
commonly lovable disposition, together with other
gifts, which only tended to become more marked
as he grew older, he was quite the favourite of
the family. Blessed with a thoroughly sound
constitution, as all averred who knew him at the
convent-school in Rossleben, at the University, or
later at the ducal court of Altenburg, he was tall
and slender, possessed an undoubted gift for poetry
and real musical talent, and was moreover a man
of delicate sensibilities, full of consideration for his
whole family, and distinguished in his manners.

My brother often refers to his Polish descent, and
in later years he even instituted research-work with
the view of establishing it, which met with partial
success. I know nothing definite concerning these

INTRODUCTION. xi

investigations, because a large number of valuable
documents were unfortunately destroyed after his
breakdown in Turin. The family tradition was
that a certain Polish nobleman Nicki (pronounced
Nietzky) had obtained the special favour of
Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, and had
received the rank of Earl from him. When, how
ever, Stanislas Leszcysski the Pole became king,
our supposed ancestor became involved in a con
spiracy in favour of the Saxons and Protestants.
He was sentenced to death ; but, taking flight,
according to the evidence of the documents, he was
ultimately befriended by a certain Earl of Briihl,
who gave him a small post in an obscure little
provincial town. Occasionally our aged aunts
would speak of our great-grandfather Nietzsche,
who was said to have died in his ninety-first year,
and words always seemed to fail them when they
attempted to describe his handsome appearance,
good breeding, and vigour. Our ancestors, both
on the Nietzsche and the Oehler side, were very
long-lived. Of the four pairs of great-grandparents,
one great-grandfather reached the age of ninety,
five great-grandmothers and -fathers died between
eighty-two and eighty-six years of age, and two only
failed to reach their seventieth year.

The sorrow which hung as a cloud over our
branch of the family was our father's death, as the
result of a heavy fall, at the age of thirty-eight.
One night, upon leaving some friends whom he had
accompanied home, he was met at the door of the
vicarage by our little dog. The little animal must
have got between his feet, for he stumbled and fell

Xli INTRODUCTION.

backwards down seven stone steps on to the paving-
stones of the vicarage courtyard. As a result of
this fall, he was laid up with concussion of the brain,
and, after a lingering illness, which lasted eleven
months, he died on the 3Oth of July 1849. The
early death of our beloved and highly-gifted father
spread gloom over the whole of our childhood. In
1850 our mother withdrew with us to Naumburg
on the Saale, where she took up her abode with our
widowed grandmother Nietzsche ; and there she
brought us up with Spartan severity and simplicity,
which, besides being typical of the period, was
quite de rigeur in her family. Of course, Grand
mamma Nietzsche helped somewhat to temper her
daughter-in-law's severity, and in this respect our
Oehler grandparents, who were less rigorous with
us, their eldest grandchildren, than with their own
children, were also very influential. Grandfather
Oehler was the first who seems to have recognised
the extraordinary talents of his eldest grandchild.
From his earliest childhood upwards, my brother
was always strong and healthy ; he often declared
that he must have been taken for a peasant-boy
throughout his childhood and youth, as he was so
plump, brown, and rosy. The thick fair hair which
fell picturesquely over his shoulders tended some
what to modify his robust appearance. Had he not
possessed those wonderfully beautiful, large, and
expressive eyes, however, and had he not been so
very ceremonious in his manner, neither his teachers
nor his relatives would ever have noticed anything
at all remarkable about the boy ; for he was both
modest and reserved.

INTRODUCTION. xiii

He received his early schooling at a preparatory
school, and later at a grammar school in Naumburg.
In the autumn of I 858, when he was fourteen years
of age, he entered the Fforta school, so famous for
the scholars it has produced. There, too, very
severe discipline prevailed, and much was exacted
from the pupils, with the view of inuring them to
great mental and physical exertions. Thus, if my
brother seems to lay particular stress upon the value
of rigorous training, free from all sentimentality, it
should be remembered that he speaks from experi
ence in this respect. At Pforta he followed the
regular school course, and he did not enter a uni
versity until the comparatively late age of twenty.
His extraordinary gifts manifested themselves
chiefly in his independent and private studies and
artistic efforts. As a boy his musical talent had
already been so noticeable, that he himself and other
competent judges were doubtful as to whether he
ought not perhaps to devote himself altogether to
music. It is, however, worth noting that everything
he did in his later years, whether in Latin, Greek, or
German work, bore the stamp of perfection — subject
of course to the limitation imposed upon him by his
years. His talents came very suddenly to the fore,
because he had allowed them to grow for such a
long time in concealment. His very first perform
ance in philology, executed while he was a student
under Ritschl, the famous philologist, was also
typical of him in this respect, seeing that it was
ordered to be printed for the Rheinische Museum.
Of course this was done amid general and grave ex
pressions of doubt; for, as Dr. Ritschl often declared,

XIV INTRODUCTION.

it was an unheard-of occurrence for a student in his
third term to prepare such an excellent treatise.

Being a great lover of out-door exercise, such as
swimming, skating,and walking, he developed into a
very sturdy lad. Rohde gives the following descrip
tion of him as a student : with his healthy com
plexion, his outward and innercleanliness,hisaustere
chastity and his solemn aspect, he was the image of
that delightful youth described by Adalbert Stifter.

Though as a child he was always rather serious,
as a lad and a man he was ever inclined to see the
humorous side of things, while his whole being, and
everything he said or did, was permeated by an
extraordinary harmony. He belonged to the very
few who could control even a bad mood and conceal
it from others. All his friends are unanimous in
their praise of his exceptional evenness of temper
and behaviour, and his warm, hearty, and pleasant
laugh that seemed to come from the very depths
of his benevolent and affectionate nature. In him
it might therefore be said, nature had produced a
being who in body and spirit was a harmonious
whole : his unusual intellect was fully in keeping
with his uncommon bodily strength.

The only abnormal thing about him, and some
thing which we both inherited from our father, was
short-sightedness, and this was very much aggra
vated in my brother's case,even in his earliest school
days, owing to that indescribable anxiety to learn
which always characterised him. When one listens
to accounts given by his friends and schoolfellows,
one is startled by the multiplicity of his studies even
in his schooldays.

INTRODUCTION. XV

In the autumn of I 864, he began his university
life in Bonn, and studied philology and theology ;
at the end of six months he gave up theology, and
in the autumn of 1865 followed his famous teacher
Ritschl to the University of Leipzig. There he
became an ardent philologist, and diligently sought
to acquire a masterly grasp of this branch of know
ledge. But in this respect it would be unfair to
forget that the school of Pforta, with its staff of
excellent teachers — scholars that would have
adorned the chairs of any University — had already
afforded the best of preparatory trainings to any one
intending to take up philology as a study, more
particularly as it gave all pupils ample scope to
indulge any individual tastes they might have for
any particular branch of ancient history. The last
important Latin thesis which my brother wrote for
the Landes-Schule, Pforta, dealt with the Megarian
poet Theognis, and it was in the rdle of a lecturer
on this very subject that, on the 1 8th January
1866, he made his first appearance in public, before
the philological society he had helped to found in
Leipzig. The paper he read disclosed his investiga
tions on the subject of Theognis the moralist and
aristocrat, who, as is well known, described and dis
missed the plebeians of his time in terms of the
heartiest contempt. The aristocratic ideal, which
was always so dear to my brother, thus revealed
itself for the first time. Moreover, curiously enough,
it was precisely this scientific thesis which was the
cause of Ritschl's recognition of my brother and
fondness for him.

The whole of his Leipzig days proved of the
b

XVI INTRODUCTION.

utmost importance to my brother's career. There
he was plunged into the very midst of a torrent
of intellectual influences which found an impression
able medium in the fiery youth, and to which he
eagerly made himself accessible. He did not,
however, forget to discriminate among them, but
tested and criticised the currents of thought he
encountered, and selected accordingly. It is
certainly of great importance to ascertain what
those influences precisely were to which he yielded,
and how long they maintained their sway over him,
and it is likewise necessary to discover exactly
when the matured mind threw off these fetters in
order to work out its own salvation.

The influences that exercised power over him
in those days may be described in the three follow
ing terms: Hellenism, Schopenhauer, Wagner. His
love of Hellenism certainly led him to philology ;
but, as a matter of fact, what concerned him most
was to obtain a wide view of things in general,
and this he hoped to derive from that science ;
philology in itself, with his splendid method and
thorough way of going to work, served him only
as a means to an end.

If Hellenism was the first strong influence which
already in Pforta obtained a sway over my brother,
in the winter of 1865-66, a completely new, and
therefore somewhat subversive, influence was intro
duced into his life with Schopenhauer's philosophy.
When he reached Leipzig in the autumn of 1865,
he was very downcast ; for the experiences that
had befallen him during his one year of student
life in Bonn had deeply depressed him. He had

INTRODUCTION. xvii

soaght at first to adapt himself to his surround
ings there, with the hope of ultimately elevating
them to his lofty views on things ; but both these
efforts proved vain, and now he had come to
Leipzig with the purpose of framing his own
manner of life. It can easily be imagined how
the first reading of Schopenhauer's The World ns
Will and Idea worked upon this man, still sting
ing from the bitterest experiences and disappoint
ments. He writes : " Here I saw a mirror in
which I espied the world, life, and my own nature
depicted with frightful grandeur." As my brother,
from his very earliest childhood, had always missed
both the parent and the educator through our
father's untimely death, he began to regard
Schopenhauer with almost filial love and respect.
He did not venerate him quite as other men did ;
Schopenhauer's personality was what attracted and
enchanted him. From the first he was never
blind to the faults in his master's system, and in
proof of this we have only to refer to an essay he
wrote in the autumn of 1867, which actually con
tains a criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy.

Now, in the autumn of 1865, to these two
influences, Hellenism and Schopenhauer, a third
influence was added — one which was to prove the
strongest ever exercised over my brother — and it
began with his personal introduction to Richard
Wagner. He was introduced to Wagner by the
latter's sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus, and his
description of their first meeting, contained in a
letter to Erwin Rohde, is really most affecting.
For years, that is to say, from the time Billow's

XV111 INTRODUCTION.

arrangement of Tristan and Isolde for the pianoforte,
had appeared, he had already been a passionate
admirer of Wagner's music ; but now that the
artist himself entered upon the scene of his life,
with the whole fascinating strength of his strong
will, my brother felt that he was in the presence
of a being whom he, of all modern men, resembled
most in regard to force of character.

Again, in the case of Richard Wagner, my
brother, from the first, laid the utmost stress upon
the man's personality, and could only regard his
works and views as an expression of the artist's
whole being, despite the fact that he by no means
understood every one of those works at that time.
My brother was the first who ever manifested
such enthusiastic affection for Schopenhauer and
Wagner, and he was also the first of that numer
ous band of young followers who ultimately in
scribed the two great names upon their banner.
Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really
corresponded to the glorified pictures my brother
painted of them, both in his letters and other
writings, is a question which we can no longer
answer in the affirmative. Perhaps what he saw
in them was only what he himself wished to be
some day.

The amount of work my brother succeeded in
accomplishing, during his student days, really
seems almost incredible. When we examine his
record for the years 1865—67, we can scarcely
believe it refers to only two years' industry, for
at a guess no one would hesitate to suggest four
years at least. But in those days, as he himself

INTRODUCTION. xix

declares, he still possessed the constitution of a
bear. He knew neither what headaches nor in
digestion meant, and, despite his short sight, his
eyes were able to endure the greatest strain with
out giving him the smallest trouble. That is why,
regardless of seriously interrupting his studies, he
was so glad at the thought of becoming a soldier
in the forthcoming autumn of 1867; for he was
particularly anxious to discover some means of
employing his bodily strength.

He discharged his duties as a soldier with the
utmost mental and physical freshness, was the
crack rider among the recruits of his year, and
was sincerely sorry when, owing to an accident,
he was compelled to leave the colours before the
completion of his service. As a result of this
accident he had his first dangerous illness.

While mounting his horse one day, the beast,
which was an uncommonly restive one, suddenly
reared, and, causing him to strike his chest sharply
against the pommel of the saddle, threw him to
the ground. My brother then made a second
attempt to mount, and succeeded this time, not
withstanding the fact that he had severely sprained
and torn two muscles in his chest, and had seri
ously bruised the adjacent ribs. For a whole day
he did his utmost to pay no heed to the injury,
and to overcome the pain it caused him ; but in
the end he only swooned, and a dangerously acute
inflammation of the injured tissues was the result.
Ultimately he was obliged to consult the famous
specialist, Professor Volkmann, in Halle, who
quickly put him right.

XX INTRODUCTION.

In October 1868, my brother returned to his
studies in Leipzig with double joy. These were
his plans: to get his doctor's degree as soon as
possible ; to proceed to Paris, Italy, and Greece ,
make a lengthy stay in each place, and then
to return to Leipzig in order to settle there as a
privat docent. All these plans were, however,
suddenly frustrated owing to his premature call
Lo the University of Bale, where he was invited
to assume the duties of professor. Some of the
philological essays he had written in his student
days, and which were published by the Rheinische
Museum, had attracted the attention of the
Educational Board at Bale. Ratsherr Wilhelm
Vischer, as representing this body, appealed to
Ritschl for fuller information. Now Ritschl, who
had early recognised my brother's extraordinary
talents, must have written a letter of such enthusi
astic praise (" Nietzsche is a genius : he can do
whatever he chooses to put his mind to "), that
one of the more cautious members of the council
is said to have observed : " If the proposed
candidate be really such a genius, then it were
better did we not appoint him ; for, in any case,
he would only stay a short time at the little
University of Bale." My brother ultimately
accepted the appointment, and, in view of his
published philological works, he was immediately
granted the doctor's degree by the University of
Leipzig. He was twenty-four years and six
months old when he took up his position as
professor in Bale, — and it was with a heavy heart
that he proceeded there, for he knew " the golden

INTRODUCTION. xxi

period of untrammelled activity " must cease. He
was, however, inspired by the deep wish of bein^
able " to transfer to his pupils some of that
Schopenhauerian earnestness which is stamped
on the brow of the sublime man." " I should like
to be something more than a mere trainer of
capable philologists : the present generation of
teachers, the care of the growing broods, — all this
is in my mind. If we must live, let us at least
do so in such wise that others may bless our life
once we have been peacefully delivered from its
toils."

When I look back upon that month of May
I 869, and ask both of friends and of myself, what
the figure of this youthful University professor of
four-and-twenty meant to the world at that time,
the reply is naturally, in the first place : that he
was one of Ritschl's best pupils ; secondly, that he
was an exceptionally capable exponent of classical
antiquity with a brilliant career before him ; and
thirdly, that he was a passionate adorer of Wagner
and Schopenhauer. But no one has any idea of
my brother's independent attitude to the science
he had selected, to his teachers and to his ideals,
and he decewed both himself and us when he
passed as a " disciple " who really shared all the
views of his respected master.

On the 28th May 1869, my brother delivered
his inaugural address at Bale University, and it is
said to have deeply impressed the authorities.
The subject of the address was " Homer and
Classical Philology."

Musing deeply, the worthy councillors and

XX11 INTRODUCTION.

professors walked homeward. What had they
just heard ? A young scholar discussing the very
justification of his own science in a cool and
philosophically critical spirit ! A man able to
impart so much artistic glamour to his subject,
that the once stale and arid study of philology
suddenly struck them — and they were certainly
not impressionable men — as the messenger of the
gods : " and just as the Muses descended upon the
dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so phil
ology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and
pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes,
and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful
and brilliant godlike figure of a distant, blue, and
happy fairyland."

" We have indeed got hold of a rare bird,
Herr Ratsherr," said one of these gentlemen to
his companion, and the latter heartily agreed, for
my brother's appointment had been chiefly his
doing.

Even in Leipzig, it was reported that Jacob
Burckhardt had said : " Nietzsche is as much an
artist as a scholar." Privy-Councillor Ritschl
told me of this himself, and then he added, with
a smile : " I always said so ; he can make his
scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as
a French novelist his novels."

" Homer and Classical Philology " - my
brother's inaugural address at the University —
was by no means the first literary attempt
he had made; for we have already seen that
he had had papers published by the Rheinische
Museum ; still, this particular discourse is import-

INTRODUCTION. XXlii

ant, seeing that it practically contains the pro
gramme of many other subsequent essays. I
must, however, emphasise this fact here, that
neither " Homer and Classical Philology," nor
The Birth of Tragedy, represents a beginning
in my brother's career. It is really surprising to
see how very soon he actually began grappling
with the questions which were to prove the
problems of his life. If a beginning to his
intellectual development be sought at all, then
it must be traced to the years 1865-67 in
Leipzig. TJie Birth of Tragedy, his maiden
attempt at book-writing, with which he began his
twenty-eighth year, is the last link of a long
chain of developments, and the first fruit that was
a long time coming to maturity. Nietzsche's
was a polyphonic nature, in which the most
different and apparently most antagonistic tal
ents had come together. Philosophy, art, and
science — in the form of philology, then — each
certainly possessed a part of him. The most
wonderful feature — perhaps it might even be
called the real Nietzschean feature — of this
versatile creature, was the fact that no eternal
strife resulted from the juxtaposition of these
inimicial traits, that not one of them strove to
dislodge, or to get the upper hand of, the others.
When Nietzsche renounced the musical career, in
order to devote himself to philology, and gave
himself up to the most strenuous study, he did
not find it essential completely to suppress his
other tendencies : as before, he continued both to
compose and derive pleasure from music, and

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

even studied counterpoint somewhat seriously.
Moreover, during his years at Leipzig, when he
consciously gave himself up to philological re
search, he began to engross himself in Schopen
hauer, and was thereby won by philosophy for
ever. Everything that could find room took up
its abode in him, and these juxtaposed factors,
far from interfering with one another's existence,
were rather mutually fertilising and stimulating.
All those who have read the first volume of the
biography with attention must have been struck
with the perfect way in which the various impulses
in his nature combined in the end to form one
general torrent, and how this flowed with ever
greater force in the direction of a single goal.
Thus science, art, and philosophy developed and
became ever more closely related in him, until,
in The Birth of Tragedy, they brought forth a
" centaur," that is to say, a work which would
have been an impossible achievement to a man
with only a single, special talent. This polyphony
of different talents, all coming to utterance
together and producing the richest and boldest
of harmonies, is the fundamental feature not only
of Nietzsche's early days, but of his whole
development. It is once again the artist,
philosopher, and man of science, who as one
man in later years, after many wanderings, re
cantations, and revulsions of feeling, produces
that other and rarer Centaur of highest rank —
Zarathustra.

The Birth of Tragedy requires perhaps a little
explaining — more particularly as we have now

INTRODUCTION. XXV

ceased to use either Schopenhauerian or Wagnerian
terms of expression. And it was for this reason
that five years after its appearance, my brother
wrote an introduction to it, in which he very
plainly expresses his doubts concerning the views
it contains, and the manner in which they are
presented. The kernel of its thought he always
recognised as perfectly correct ; and all he de
plored in later days was that he had spoiled the
grand problem of Hellenism, as he understood it,
by adulterating it with ingredients taken from the
world of most modern ideas. As time went on, he
grew ever more and more anxious to define the
deep meaning of this book with greater precision
and clearness. A very good elucidation of its
aims, which unfortunately was never published,
appears among his notes of the year 1886, and
is as follows : —

" Concerning The Birth of Tragedy. — A book
consisting of mere experiences relating to pleasur
able and unpleasurable aesthetic states, with a
metaphysico-artistic background. At the same'
time the confession of a romanticist (the suffered
feels the deepest longing for beauty — he begets if) ;
finally, a product of youth, full of youthful courage
and melancholy.

" Fundamental psychological experiences : the
word ' Apollonian ' stands for that state of rapt
repose in the presence of a visionary world, in the
presence of the world of beautiful appearance
designed as a deliverance from becoming1: the
word Dionysos, on the other hand, stands for
strenuous becoming, grown self-conscious, in the

XXVI INTRODUCTION.

form of the rampant voluptuousness of the creator,
who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger
of the destroyer.

" The antagonism of these two attitudes and
the desires that underlie them. The first-named
would have the vision it conjures up eternal: in
its light man must be quiescent, apathetic, peace
ful, healed, and on friendly terms with himself and
all existence ; the second strives after creation,
after the voluptuousness of wilful creation, i.e.
constructing and destroying. Creation felt and
explained as an instinct would be merely the
unremitting inventive action of a dissatisfied
being, overflowing with wealth and living at high
tension and high pressure, — of a God who would
overcome the sorrows of existence by means
only of continual changes and transformations, —
appearance as a transient and momentary deliver
ance ; the world as an apparent sequence of
godlike visions and deliverances.

" This metaphysico-artistic attitude is opposed
to Schopenhauer's one-sided view, which values
art, not from the artist's standpoint but from the
spectator's, because it brings salvation and deliver
ance by means of the joy produced by unreal as
opposed to the existing or the real (the experi
ence only of him who is suffering and is in
despair owing to himself and everything existing).
—Deliverance in ft\& form and its eternity (just as
Plato may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced
in a complete subordination of all too excitable
sensibilities, even in the idea itself). To this is
opposed the second point of view — art regarded

INTRODUCTION. xxvii

as a phenomenon of the artist, above all of the
musician : the torture of being obliged to create,
as a Dionysian instinct.

" Tragic art, rich in both attitudes, represents
the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysos.
Appearance is given the greatest importance by
Dionysos ; and yet it will be denied and cheerfully
denied. This is directed against Schopenhauer's
teaching of Resignation as the tragic attitude
towards the world.

" Against Wagner's theory that music is a
means and drama an end.

" A desire for tragic myth (for religion and even
pessimistic religion) as for a forcing frame in
which certain plants flourish.

" Mistrust of science, although its ephemerally
soothing optimism be strongly felt ; the ' serenity '
of the theoretical man.

" Deep antagonism to Christianity. Why ?
The degeneration of the Germanic spirit is ascribed
to its influence.

" Any justification of the world can only be
an esthetic one. Profound suspicions about
morality ( — it is part and parcel of the world tof
appearance).

" The happiness of existence is only possible as
the happiness derived from appearance. ({ Being*
is a fiction invented by those who suffer from
becoming?)

" Happiness in becoming is possible only in
the annihilation of the real, of the ' existing/
of the beautifully visionary, — in the pessimistic
dissipation of illusions : — with the annihilation

XXviH INTRODUCTION.

of the most beautiful phenomena in the world
of appearance, Dionysian happiness reaches its
zenith."

The Birth of Tragedy is really only a portion
of a much greater work on Hellenism, which my
brother had always had in view from the time
of his student days. But even the portion it
represents was originally designed upon a much
larger scale than the present one ; the reason
probably being, that Nietzsche desired only to be
of service to Wagner. When a certain portion
of the projected work on Hellenism was ready
and had received the title Greek Cheerfulness,
my brother happened to call upon Wagner at
Tribschen in April 1871, and found him very
low-spirited in regard to the mission of his life.
My brother was very anxious to take some decis
ive step to help him, and, laying the plans of his
great work on Greece aside, he selected a small
portion from the already completed manuscript
— a portion dealing with one distinct side of
Hellenism, — to wit, its tragic art. He then
associated Wagner's music with it and the name
Dionysos, and thus took the first step towards
that world-historical view through which we have
since grown accustomed to regard Wagner.

From the dates of the various notes relating
to it, The Birth of Tragedy must have been written
between the autumn of 1869 and November
187 1 — a period during which " a mass of aesthetic
questions and answers " was fermenting in
Nietzsche's mind. It was first published in
January 1872 by E. W. Fritsch, in Leipzig,

INTRODUCTION. xxix

under the title The Birth of Tragedy out of
the Spirit of Music. Later on the title was
changed to The Birth of Tragedy^ or Hellenism
and Pessimism.

ELIZABETH FORSTER-NIETZSCHE.
WEIMAR, September 190$.

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-
CRITICISM.

I.

WHATEVER may lie at the bottom of this doubt
ful book must be a question of the first rank
and attractiveness, moreover a deeply personal
question, — in proof thereof observe the time
in which it originated, in spite of which it origin
ated, the exciting period of the Franco-German
war of 1870-71. While the thunder of the
battle of Worth rolled over Europe, the ruminator
and riddle-lover, who had to be the parent of this
book, sat somewhere in a nook of the Alps, lost in
riddles and ruminations, consequently very much
concerned and unconcerned at the same time, and
wrote down his meditations on the Greeks, — the
kernel of the curious and almost inaccessible book,
to which this belated prologue (or epilogue) is to
be devoted. A few weeks later : and he found
himself under the walls of Metz, still wrestling
with the notes of interrogation he had set down
concerning the alleged " cheerfulness " of the Greeks
and of Greek art ; till at last, in that month of
A

2 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

deep suspense, when peace was debated at Ver
sailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and,
slowly recovering from a disease brought home
from the field, made up his mind definitely re
garding the " Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music." — From music? Music and Tragedy?
Greeks and tragic music? Greeks and the Art
work of pessimism ? A race of men, well-fashioned,
beautiful, envied, life-inspiring, like no other race
hitherto, the Greeks — indeed ? The Greeks were
in need of tragedy ? Yea — of art ? Wherefore —
Greek art ? ...

We can thus guess where the great note of
interrogation concerning the value of existence
had been set. Is pessimism necessarily the sign
of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and
weakened instincts ? — as was the case with the
Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us
" modern " men and Europeans ? Is there a pessi
mism of strength ? An intellectual predilection for
what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in exist
ence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to
fullness of existence ? Is there perhaps suffering
in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with
the keenest of glances, which yearns for the
terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, with
whom it may try its strength ? from whom it is
willing to learn what " fear " is ? Wrhat means
tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest,
bravest era ? And the prodigious phenomenon of
the Dionysian ? And that which was born there
of, tragedy ? — And again : that of which tragedy
died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics,

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 3

contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical
man — indeed ? might not this very Socratism be
a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of
anarchically disintegrating instincts ? And the
" Hellenic cheerfulness " of the later Hellenism
merely a glowing sunset ? The Epicurean will
counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the
sufferer? And science itself, our science — ay,
viewed as a symptom of life, what really signifies
all science ? Whither, worse still, whence — all
science? Well? Is scientism perhaps only fear
and evasion of pessimism ? A subtle defence
against — truth ? Morally speaking, something
like falsehood and cowardice? And, unmorally
speaking, an artifice? O Socrates, Socrates, was
this perhaps tJiy secret ? Oh mysterious ironist,
was this perhaps thine — irony ? . . .

2.

What I then laid hands on, something terriblr
and dangerous, a problem with horns, not neces
sarily a bull itself, but at all events a new problem :
I should say to-day it was the problem of science
itself — science conceived for the first time as prob
lematic, as questionable. But the book, in which
my youthful ardour and suspicion then discharged
themselves — what an impossible book must needs
grow out of a task so disagreeable to youth. Con
structed of nought but precocious, unripened self-
experiences, all of which lay close to the threshold
of the communicable, based on the groundwork of

4 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

art — for the problem of science cannot be discerned
on the groundwork of science, — a book perhaps for
artists, with collateral analytical and retrospective
aptitudes (that is, an exceptional kind of artists,
for whom one must seek and does not even care
to seek . . .), full of psychological innovations and
artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in the
background, a work of youth, full of youth's mettle
and youth's melancholy, independent, defiantly
self-sufficient even when it seems to bow to some
authority and self-veneration ; in short, a firstling-
work, even in every bad sense of the term ; in
spite of its senile problem, affected with every
fault of youth, above all with youth's pro
lixity and youth's " storm and stress " : on the
other hand, in view of the success it had (especi
ally with the great artist to whom it addressed
itself, as it were, in a duologue, Richard Wagner)
a demonstrated book, I mean a book which, at any
rate, sufficed " for the best of its time." On this
account, if for no other reason, it should be treated
with some consideration and reserve ; yet I shall
not altogether conceal how disagreeable it now
appears to me, how after sixteen years it stands a
total stranger before me, — before an eye which is
more mature, and a hundred times more fastidious,
but which has by no means grown colder nor lost
any of its interest in that self-same task essayed
for the first time by this daring book, — to view
science through the optics of the artist, and art more
over through the optics of Life. . . .

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 5

3-

I say again, to-day it is an impossible book to
me, — I call it badly written, heavy, painful, image-
angling and image-entangling, maudlin, sugared
at times even to femininism, uneven in tempo,
void of the will to logical cleanliness, very con
vinced and therefore rising above the necessity cf
demonstration, distrustful even of the propriety of
demonstration, as being a book for initiates, as
" music " for those who are baptised with the
name of Music, who are united from the beginning
of things by common ties of rare experiences in
art, as a countersign for blood-relations in artibus.
— a haughty and fantastic book, which from the
very first withdraws even more from the pro-
fanum vulgus of the " cultured " than from the
" people," but which also, as its effect has shown
and still shows, knows very well how to seek
fellow-enthusiasts and lure them to new by-ways
and dancing-grounds. Here, at any rate — thus
much was acknowledged with curiosity as well
as with aversion — a strange voice spoke, the
disciple of a still " unknown God," who for the
time being had hidden himself under the hood
of the scholar, under the German's gravity and
disinclination for dialectics, even under the bad
manners of the Wagnerian ; here was a spirit
with strange and still nameless needs, a memory
bristling with questions, experiences and obscur
ities, beside which stood the name Dionysos like
one more note of interrogation ; here spoke —
people said to themselves with misgivings — some-

6 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

thing like a mystic and almost maenadic soul,
which, undecided whether it should disclose or
conceal itself, stammers with an effort and caprici
ously as in a strange tongue. It should have
sung, this " new soul " — and not spoken ! What
a pity, that I did not dare to say what I then had
to say, as a poet : I could have done so perhaps !
Or at least as a philologist : — for even at the
present day well-nigh everything in this domain
remains to be discovered and disinterred by the
philologist ! Above all the problem, that here
there is a problem before us, — and that, so long
as we have no answer to the question " what is
Dionysian ? " the Greeks are now as ever wholly
unknown and inconceivable ,

Ay, what is Dionysian? — In this book may be
found an answer, — a " knowing one " speaks here,
the votary and disciple of his god. Perhaps I
should now speak more guardedly and less elo
quently of a psychological question so difficult as
the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A
fundamental question is the relation of the Greek
to pain, his degree of sensibility, — did this relation
remain constant ? or did it veer about ? — the ques
tion, whether his ever-increasing longing for beauty,
for festivals, gaieties, new cults, did really grow
out of want, privation, melancholy, pain ? For
suppose even this to be true — and Pericles (or
Thucydides) intimates as much in the great
Funeral Speech : — whence then the opposite

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 7

longing, which appeared first in the order of time,
the longing for the ugly, the good, resolute desire
of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth,
for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enig
matical, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence,
—whence then must tragedy have sprung? Per-
haps from j'oj', from strength, from exuberant health,
from over-fullness. And what then, physiologic
ally speaking, is the meaning of that madness,
out of which comic as well as tragic art has
grown, the Dionysian madness ? What ? perhaps
madness is not necessarily the symptom of
degeneration, of decline, of belated culture?
Perhaps there are — a question for alienists —
neuroses of health? of folk-youth and -youthful-
ness ? What does that synthesis of god and goat
in the Satyr point to? What self-experience
what " stress," made the Greek think of the
Dionysian reveller and primitive man as a satyr ?
And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus :
perhaps there were endemic ecstasies in the eras
when the Greek body bloomed and the Greek
soul brimmed over with life ? Visions and hallu
cinations, which took hold of entire communities,
entire cult-assemblies ? What if the Greeks in the
very wealth of their youth had the will to be tragic
and were pessimists? WThat if it was madness
itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the
greatest blessings upon Hellas? And what if,
on the other hand and conversely, at the very
time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks
became always more optimistic, more superficial,
more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the

8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

logicising of the world, — consequently at the same
time more " cheerful " and more " scientific " ?
Ay, despite all " modern ideas " and prejudices
of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of
optimism, the common sense that has gained the
upper hand, the practical and theoretical utilitar
ianism, like democracy itself, with which it is
synchronous — be symptomatic of declining vigour,
of approaching age, of physiological weariness ?
And not at all — pessimism? Was Epicurus an
optimist — because a sufferer ? . . . We see it is a
whole bundle of weighty questions which this book
has taken upon itself, — let us not fail to add its
weightiest question ! Viewed through the optics
of life, what is the meaning of — morality ? . . .

5-

Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner,
art — and not morality — is set down as the properly
metaphysical activity of man ; in the book itself
the piquant proposition recurs time and again,
that the existence of the world is justified only as
an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book
recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after
thought behind all occurrences, — a " God," if you
will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless
and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as
in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to
become conscious of his own equable joy and
sovereign glory ; who, in creating worlds, frees
himself from the anguish of fullness and overfull-
ness, from the suffering of the contradictions con-

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 9

centrated within him. The world, that is, the
redemption of God attained at every moment, as
the perpetually changing, perpetually new vision
of the most suffering, most antithetical, most
contradictory being, who contrives to redeem him
self only in appearance : this entire artist-meta
physics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you
will, — the point is, that it already betrays a spirit,
which is determined some day, at all hazards, to
make a stand against the moral interpretation
and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the
first time, a pessimism " Beyond Good and Evil "
announces itself, here that " perverseness of dis
position " obtains expression and formulation,
against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of
hurling beforehand his angriest imprecations and
thunderbolts, — a philosophy which dares to put,
derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of
phenomena, and not only among " phenomena "
(in the sense of the idealistic terminus tecJinicus],
but among the " illusions," as appearance, sem
blance, error, interpretation, accommodation, art.
Perhaps the depth of this antimoral tendency may
be best estimated from the guarded and hostile
silence with which Christianity is treated through
out this book, — Christianity, as being the most
extravagant burlesque of the moral theme to which
mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In
fact, to the purely aesthetic world-interpretation
and justification taught in this book, there is no
greater antithesis than the Christian dogma, which
is only and will be only moral, and which, with
its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness

IO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

of God, relegates — that is, disowns, convicts,
condemns — art, all art, to the realm of falsehood.
Behind such a mode of thought and valuation,
which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art,
I always experienced what was hostile to life, the
wrathful, vindictive counterwill to life itself: for
all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics,
necessity of perspective and error. From the very
first Christianity was, essentially and thoroughly,
the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life, which only
disguised, concealed and decked itself out under
the belief in "another" or "better" life. The
hatred of the " world," the curse on the affections,
the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world,
invented for the purpose of slandering this world
the more, at bottom a longing for Nothingness,
for the end, for rest, for the " Sabbath of Sabbaths "
— all this, as also the unconditional will of
Christianity to recognise only moral values, has
always appeared to me as the most dangerous
and ominous of all possible forms of a " will to
perish " ; at the least, as the symptom of a most
fatal disease, of profoundest weariness, despondency,
exhaustion, impoverishment of life, — for before
the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that
is, unconditional morality) life must constantly
and inevitably be the loser, because life is some
thing essentially unmoral, — indeed, oppressed
with the weight of contempt and the everlasting
No, life must finally be regarded as unworthy of
desire, as in itself unworthy. Morality itself
what ? — may not morality be a " will to disown
life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. II

of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning
of the end ? And, consequently, the danger oi
dangers ? ... It was against morality, therefore,
that my instinct, as an intercessory instinct for
life, turned in this questionable book, inventing
for itself a fundamental counter - dogma and
counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely
anti-Christian. What should I call it? As a
philologist and man of words I baptised it, not
without some liberty — for who could be sure of the
proper name of the Antichrist ? — with the name of
a Greek god : I called it Dionysian.

6.

You see which problem I ventured to touch upon
in this early work ? . . . How I now regret, that I
had not then the courage (or immodesty?) to allow
myself, in all respects, the use of an individual
language for such individual contemplations and
ventures in the field of thought — that I laboured to
express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formula?,
strange and new valuations, which ran fundament
ally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopen
hauer, as well as to their taste ! What, forsooth,
were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy ? " What
gives " — he says in Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
II. 495 — "to all tragedy that singular swing
towards elevation, is the awakening of the know
ledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy
us thoroughly, and consequently is not worthy of
our attachment. In this consists the tragic spirit:
it therefore leads to resignation" Oh, how

12 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

differently Dionysos spoke to me ! Oh how fai
from me then was just this entire resignationism !
— But there is something far worse in this book,
which I now regret even more than having
obscured and spoiled Dionysian anticipations with
Schopenhauerian formulae : to wit, that, in general,
I spoiled the grand Hellenic problem^ as it had
opened up before me, by the admixture of the
most modern things ! That I entertained hopes,
where nothing was to be hoped for, where every
thing pointed all-too-clearly to an approaching
end ! That, on the basis of our latter-day
German music, I began to fable about the
" spirit of Teutonism," as if it were on the point
of discovering and returning to itself, — ay, at the
very time that the German spirit which not so
very long before had had the will to the lordship
over Europe, the strength to lead and govern
Europe, testamentarily and conclusively resigned
and, under the pompous pretence of empire-found
ing, effected its transition to mediocritisation,
democracy, and " modern ideas." In very fact,
I have since learned to regard this "spirit
of Teutonism " as something to be despaired
of and unsparingly treated, as also our present
German music, which is Romanticism through and
through and the most un-Grecian of all possible
forms of art : and moreover a first-rate nerve-
destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people given
to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue,
namely, in its two-fold capacity of an intoxi
cating and stupefying narcotic. Of course, apart
from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. 13

to matters specially modern, with which I then
spoiled my first book, the great Dionysian note
of interrogation, as set down therein, continues
standing on and on, even with reference to music :
how must we conceive of a music, which is no longer
of Romantic origin, like the German ; but of
Dionysian ? . . .

7-

— But, my dear Sir, if your book is not Roman
ticism, what in the world is ? Can the deep hatred
of the present, of " reality " and " modern ideas "
be pushed farther than has been done in your
artist-metaphysics? — which would rather believe
in Nothing, or in the devil, than in the " Now " ?
Does not a radical bass of wrath and annihilative
pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal
vocal art and aural seduction, a mad determination
to oppose all that " now " is, a will which is not
so very far removed from practical nihilism and
which seems to say : " rather let nothing be true,
than that you should be in the right, than that
your truth should prevail ! " Hear, yourself, my
dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever so
unlocked ears, a single select passage of your
own booK, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer
passage, which may sound insidiously rat-charm
ing to young ears and hearts. What ? is not
that the true blue romanticist-confession of 1830
under the mask of the pessimism of 1850? After
which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once
strike* up, — rupture, collapse, return and prostra
tion before an old belief, before the old God. . . .

14 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

What ? is not your pessimist book itself a piece
of anti- Hellenism and Romanticism, something
" equally intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic
at all events, ay, a piece of music, of German
music ? But listen :

Let us imagine a rising generation with this un-
dauntedness of vision, with this heroic impulse towards
the prodigious, let us imagine the bold step of these
dragon -slayers, the proud daring with which they turn
their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in
order " to live resolutely " in the Whole and in the Full :
would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this
culture, with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror,
to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort,
tragedy as the Helena belonging to him, and that he
should exclaim with Faust :

" Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsiichtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"*

" Would it not be necessary ? " . . . No, thrice
no ! ye young romanticists : it would not be
necessary ! But it is very probable, that things
may end thus, that ye may end thus, namely
" comforted," as it is written, in spite of all self-
discipline to earnestness and terror ; metaphysic
ally comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont
to end, as Christians. . . . No ! ye should first
of all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should
learn to laugh, my young friends, if ye are at
all determined to remain pessimists : if so, you

* And shall not I, by mightiest desire,
In living shape that sole fair form acquire ?

SWANWICK, trans, of Faust.

AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. I 5

will perhaps, as laughing ones, eventually send all
metaphysical com fort ism to the devil — and meta
physics first of all ! Or, to say it in the language
of that Dionysian ogre, called ZaratJiustra :

" Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher !
And do not forget your legs ! Lift up also your legs, ye
good dancers— and better still if ye stand also on your
heads !

" This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown
— I myself have put on this crown ; I myself have
consecrated my laughter. No one else have I found
to-day strong enough for this.

"Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one,
who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight,
beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a bliss
fully light-spirited one :—

" Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-
laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who
loveth leaps and side-leaps : I myself have put on this
crown !

" This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown
— to you my brethren do I cast this crown ! Laughing
have I consecrated : ye higher men, learn, I pray you—
to laugh ! "

Thus spake Zarathustra^ Ixxiii. 17, 18, and 20.

SILS MARIA, OBERKNGADIN,
Au&ust 1886.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC

FOREWORD TO RICHARD
WAGNER.

IN order to keep at a distance all the possible
scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings to
which the thoughts gathered in this essay will
give occasion, considering the peculiar character
of our aesthetic publicity, and to be able also Co
write the introductory remarks with the same
contemplative delight, the impress of which, as
the petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it
bears on every page, I form a conception of the
moment when you, my highly honoured friend,
will receive this essay ; how you, say after an
evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the
unbound Prometheus on the title-page, read my
name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever
this essay may contain, the author has something
earnest and impressive to say, and, moreover, that
in all his meditations he communed with you as
with one present and could thus write only what
befitted your presence. You will thus remember
that it was at the same time as your magnificent
dissertation on Beethoven originated, vi/., amidst

20 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

the horrors and sublimities of the war which had
just then broken out, that I collected myself for
these thoughts. But those persons would err, to
whom this collection suggests no more perhaps
than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and
aesthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and
sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this
essay, such readers will, rather to their surprise,
discover how earnest is the German problem we
have to deal with, which we properly place, as
a vortex and turning-point, in the very midst of
German hopes. Perhaps, however, this same
class of readers will be shocked at seeing an
aesthetic problem taken so seriously, especially if
they can recognise in art no more than a merry
diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the
" earnestness of existence " : as if no one were
aware of the real meaning of this confrontation
with the "earnestness of existence." These
earnest ones may be informed that I am convinced
that art is the highest task and the properly
metaphysical activity of this life, as it is under
stood by the man, to whom, as my sublime
protagonist on this path, I would now dedicate
this essay.

BASEL, end of the year 1871.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

I.

WE shall have gained much for the science of
aesthetics, when once we have perceived not only
by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty
of intuition, that the continuous development of
art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian
and the Dionysian : in like manner as procreation
is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving
perpetual conflicts with only periodically inter
vening reconciliations. These names we borrow
from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent
observer the profound mysteries of their view of
art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively
clear figures of their world of deities. It is in
connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-
deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there
existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in
origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the
Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of
Dionysus : both these so heterogeneous tendencies
run parallel to each other, for the most part openly
at variance, and continually inciting each other to
new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

them the strife of this antithesis, which is but
seemingly bridged over by their mutual term
" Art " ; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of
the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each
other, and through this pairing eventually generate
the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work
of Attic tragedy.

In order to bring these two tendencies within
closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the
separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness ;
between which physiological phenomena a con
trast may be observed analogous to that existing
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In
dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius,
the glorious divine figures first appeared to the
souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld the
charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings,
and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries
of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested
dreams and would have offered an explanation resem
bling that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersingers : —

Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,

dass er sein Traumen deut' und merk'.

Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn

wird ihm im Traume aufgethan :

all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei

ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.*

* My friend, just this is poet's task :
His dreams to read and to unmask.
Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed
In dream to man will be revealed.
All verse-craft and poetisation
Is but soothdream interpretation.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 23

The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds,
in the production of which every man is a perfect
artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and
in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of
poetry also. We take delight in the immediate
apprehension of form ; all forms speak to us ; there
is nothing" indifferent, nothing superfluous. But,
together with the highest life of this dream-reality
we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation
of its appearance : such at least is my experience,
as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I
could adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of
the poets. Indeed, the man of philosophic turn
has a foreboding that underneath this reality in
which we live and have our being, another and
altogether different reality lies concealed, and that
therefore it is also an appearance ; and Schopen
hauer actually designates the gift of occasionally
regarding men and things as mere phantoms and
dream-pictures as the criterion of philosophical
ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art
stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams
as the philosopher to the reality of existence ; he
is a close and willing observer, for from these
pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these
processes he trains himself for life. And it is
perhaps not orrfy the agreeable and friendly
pictures that he realises in himself with such
perfect understanding : the earnest, the troubled,
the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the
tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in
short, the whole " Divine Comedy " of life, and
the Inferno, also pass before him, not merely like

24 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

pictures on the wall — for he too lives and suffers
in these scenes, — and yet not without that fleeting
sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a
one will, like myself, recollect having sometimes
called out cheeringly and not without success
amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life : " It
is a dream ! I will dream on ! " I have likewise
been told of persons capable of continuing the
causality of one and the same dream for three and
even more successive nights : all of which facts
clearly testify that our innermost being, the
common substratum of all of us, experiences our
dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence.

This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-
experience has likewise been embodied by the
Greeks in their Apollo : for Apollo, as the god of
all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god.
He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates)
is the " shining one," the deity of light, also rules
over the fair appearance of the inner world of
fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of
these states in contrast to the only partially
intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep con
sciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep
and dream, is at the same time the symbolical
analogue of the faculty of soothsaying and, in
general, of the arts, through which life is made
possible and worth living. But also that delicate
line, which the dream-picture must not overstep
— lest it act pathologically (in which case appear
ance, being reality pure and simple, would impose
upon us) — must not be wanting in the picture of
Apollo : that measured limitation, that freedom

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 25

from the wilder emotions, that philosophical
calmness of the sculptor-god. His eye must be
" sunlike," according to his origin ; even when it
is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of
his beauteous appearance is still there. And so
we might apply to Apollo, in an eccentric sense,
what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in
the veil of Maya * : Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
I. p. 416: "Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded
in every direction, rising and falling with howling
mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and
trusts in his frail barque : so in the midst of a
world of sorrows the individual sits quietly sup
ported by and trusting in his principium individu-
ationis." Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that
ii7~~Eirn the unshaken faith in this principium and
the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have
received their sublimest expression ; and we might
even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image
of the principium individuationis, from out of
the gestures and looks of which all the joy and
wisdom of " appearance," together with its beauty,
speak to us.

In the same work Schopenhauer has described
to us the stupendous awe which seizes upon man,
when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for
the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the
principle of reason, in some one of its manifesta
tions, seems to admit of an exception. Add to
this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the

* Cf. World and Will as Idea, \. 455 fif., trans, by Haldanc
and Kemp.

26 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this
same collapse of the principium individuationis^
and we shall gain an insight into the being of the
Dionysian, which is brought within closest ken
perhaps by the analogy of drunkenness. It is
either under the influence of the narcotic draught,
of which the hymns of all primitive men and
peoples tell us, pr by the powerful approach of
spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those
Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation
of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-
forgetfulness. So also in the German" Middle
Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing
in number, were borne from place to place under
this same Dionysian power. In these St. John's
and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive the
Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their previous
history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon
and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some, who,
from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn
away from such phenomena as " folk-diseases "
with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the
consciousness of their own health : of course, the
poor wretches do not divine what a cadaverous-
looking and ghastly aspect this very " health "
of theirs presents when the glowing life of the
Dionysian revellers rushes past them.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only
is the covenant between man and man again
established, but also estranged, hostile or sub
jugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation
with her lost son, man. Of her own accord earth
proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 27

prey approach from the desert and the rocks.
The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers
and garlands : panthers and tigers pass beneath
his yoke. Change Beethoven's " jubilee-song "
into a painting, and, if your imagination be equal
to the occasion when the awestruck millions sink
into the dust, you will then be able to approach
the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man,
now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which neces
sity, caprice, or " shameless fashion " has set up
between man and man, are broken down. Now,
at the evangel of cosmic harmony, each one feels
himself not only united, reconciled, blended with
his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil
of Maya had been torn and were now merely
fluttering in tatters before the mysterious
Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man
exhibits himself as a member of a higher com
munity : he has forgotten how to walk and speak,
and is on the point of taking a dancing flight
into the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment.
Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth
yields milk and honey, so also something super
natural sounds forth from him : he feels himself
a god, he himself now walks about enchanted
and elated even as the gods whom he saw
walking about in his dreams. Man is no longer
an artist, he has become a work of art : the
artistic power of all nature here reveals itself
in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest
gratification of the Primordial Unity. The
noblest clay, the costliest marble, namely man,
is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel strokes of

28 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with
the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries : " Ihr stiirzt
nieder, Millionen ? Ahnest du den Schopfer,
Welt ? " *

Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and
his antithesis, the Dionysian, as ^artistic powers,
which burst forth from nature herself, witTwut the
mediation of the human artist, and in which her
art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate
and direct way : first, as the pictorial world of
dreams, the perfection of which has no connection
whatever with the intellectual height or artistic
culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken,
reality, which likewise does not heed the unit
man, but even seeks to destroy the individual
and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness.
Anent these immediate art-states of nature £very
artist is either an " imitator," to wit, either an
Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an
artist in ecstasies, or finally — as for instance in
Greek tragedy — an artist in both dreams and
ecstasies : so we may perhaps picture him, as in
his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-
abnegation, lonesome and apart from the revelling
choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through
Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e.,

* Ye bow in the dust, oh millions ?
Thy maker, mortal, dost divine ?

Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth
Symphony. — TR.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 29

his oneness with the primal source of the universe,
reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream-picture.

After these general premisings and contrastings,
let us now approach the Greeks in order to learn
in what degree and to what height these art-
impulses of nature were developed in them :
whereby we shall be enabled to understand and
appreciate more deeply the relation of the Greek
artist to his archetypes, or, according to the
Aristotelian expression, " the imitation of nature."
In spite of all the dream-literature and the
numerous dream-anecdotes of the Greeks, we can
speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree
of certainty, of their dreams. Considering the
incredibly precise and unerring plastic power of
their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere
delight in colours, we can hardly refrain (to the
shame of every one born later) from assuming for
their very dreams a logical causality of lines and
contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes
resembling their best reliefs, the perfection of
which would certainly justify us, if a comparison
were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks
as Homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek : in
a deeper sense than when modern man, in respect
to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with
Shakespeare.

On the other hand, we should not have to
speak conjecturally, if asked to disclose the im
mense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek
from the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters
of the Ancient World — to say nothing of the
modern — from Rome as far as Babylon, we can

3O THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

prove the existence of Dionysian festivals, the
type of which bears, at best, the same relation to
the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who
borrowed his name and attributes from the goat,
does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every
instance the centre of these festivals lay in extra
vagant sexual licentiousness, the waves of which
overwhelmed all family life and its venerable
traditions ; the very wildest beasts of nature were
let loose here, including that detestable mixture
of lust and cruelty which has always seemed to
me the genuine " witches' draught." For some
time, however, it would seem that the Greeks
were perfectly secure and guarded against the
feverish agitations of these festivals ( — the know
ledge of which entered Greece by all the channels
of land and sea) by the figure of Apollo himself
rising here in full pride, who could not have held
out the Gorgon's head to a more dangerous power
than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It is
in Doric art that this majestically-rejecting atti
tude of Apollo perpetuated itself. This opposition
became more precarious and even impossible,
when, from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic
nature, similar impulses finally broke forth and
made way for themselves : the Delphic god, by a
seasonably effected reconciliation, was now con
tented with taking the destructive arms from the
hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconcilia
tion marks the most important moment in the
history of the Greek cult : wherever we turn our
eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from
this event. It was the reconciliation of two anta-

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 31

gonists, with the sharp demarcation of the
boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by
each, and with periodical transmission of testi
monials ; — in reality, the chasm was not bridged
over. But if we observe how, under the pressure
of this conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power
manifested itself, we shall now recognise in the
Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with
the Babylonian Sacaea and their retrogression of
man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of
festivals of world-redemption and days of trans
figuration. Not till then does nature attain her
artistic jubilee ; not till then does the rupture of
t\\e principium individuationis become an artistic
phenomenon. That horrible " witches' draught "
of sensuality and cruelty was here powerless : only
the curious blending and duality in the emotions
of the Dionysian revellers reminds one of it — just
as medicines remind one of deadly poisons, — that
phenomenon, to wit, that pains beget joy, that
jubilation wrings painful sounds out of the breast.
From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or
the yearning wail over an irretrievable loss. In
these Greek festivals a sentimental trait, as it were,
breaks forth from nature, as if she must sigh
over her dismemberment into individuals. The
song and pantomime of such dually-minded revel
lers was something new and unheard-of in the
Homeric-Grecian world : and the Dionysian music
in particular excited awe and horror. If music,
as it would seem, was previously known as an
Apollonian art, it was, strictly speaking, only as
the wave-beat of rhythm, the formative power of

32 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

which was developed to the representation of Apol
lonian conditions. The music of Apollo was
Doric architectonics in tones, but in merely
suggested tones, such as those of the cithara.
The very element which forms the essence of
Dionysian music (and hence of music in general)
is carefully excluded as un-Apollonian ; namely,
the thrilling power of the tone, the uniform stream
of the melos, and the thoroughly incomparable
world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb
man is incited to the highest exaltation of all
his symbolic faculties ; something never before
experienced struggles for utterance — the annihila
tion of the veil of Maya, Oneness as genius of the
race, ay, of nature. The essence of nature is now
to be expressed symbolically ; a new world of
symbols is required ; for once the entire symbolism
of the body, not only the symbolism of the lips,
face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of
dancing which sets all the members into rhyth
mical motion. Thereupon the other symbolic
powers, those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics,
and harmony, suddenly become impetuous. To
comprehend this collective discharge of all the
symbolic powers, a man must have already attained
that height of self-abnegation, which wills to
express itself symbolically through these powers:
the Dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is therefore
understood only by those like himself! With
what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek
have beheld him ! With an astonishment, which
was all the greater the more it was mingled with
the shuddering suspicion that all this was in

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 33

reality not so very foreign to him, yea, that, like
unto a veil, his Apollonian consciousness only hid
this Dionysian world from his view.

In order to comprehend this, we must take
down the artistic structure of the Apollonian
culture ', as it were, stone by stone, till we behold
the foundations on which it rests. Here we
observe first of all the glorious Olympian figures of
the gods, standing on the gables of this structure,
whose deeds, represented in far-shining reliefs,
adorn its friezes. Though Apollo stands among
them as an individual deity, side by side with
others, and without claim to priority of rank, we
must not suffer this fact to mislead us. The
same impulse which embodied itself in Apollo has,
in general, given birth to this whole Olympian
world, and in this sense we may regard Apollo as
the father thereof. What was the enormous need
from which proceeded such an illustrious group of
Olympian beings?

Whosoever, with another religion in his heart,
approaches these Olympians and seeks among
them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for
incorporeal spiritualisation, for sympathetic looks
of love, will soon be obliged to turn his back
on them, discouraged and disappointed. Here
nothing suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty :
here only an exuberant, even triumphant life
speaks to us4 in which everything existing is
deified, whether good or bad. And so the
C

34 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

spectator will perhaps stand quite bewildered
before this fantastic exuberance of life, and ask
himself what magic potion these madly merry
men could have used for enjoying life, so that,
wherever they turned their eyes, Helena, the ideal
image of their own existence " floating in sweet
sensuality," smiled upon them. But to this
spectator, already turning backwards, we must
call out : " depart not hence, but hear rather what
Greek folk-wisdom says of this same life, which
with such inexplicable cheerfulness spreads out
before thee. There is an ancient story that king
Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the
wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without
capturing him. When at last he fell into his
hands, the king asked what was best of all and
most desirable for man. Fixed and immovable,
the demon remained silent ; till at last, forced by
the king, he broke out with shrill laughter into
these words: "Oh, wretched race of a day,
children of chance and misery, why do ye compel
me to say to you what it were most expedient for
you not to hear? What is best of all is for ever
beyond your reach : not to be born, not to be, to
be nothing. The second best for you, however,
is soon to die."

How is the Olympian world of deities related
to this folk-wisdom ? Even as the rapturous
vision of the tortured martyr to his sufferings.

Now the Olympian magic mountain opens, as
it were, to our view and shows to us its roots.
The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors
of existence : to be able to live at all, he had to

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 35

interpose the shining dream-birth of the Olympian
world between himself and them. The excessive
distrust of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira
throning inexorably over all knowledge, the
vulture of the great philanthropist Prometheus,
the terrible fate of the wise CEdipus, the family
curse of the Atridae which drove Orestes to
matricide ; in short, that entire philosophy of the
sylvan god, with its mythical exemplars, which
wrought the ruin of the melancholy Etruscans —
was again and again surmounted anew by the
Greeks through the artistic middle world of the
Olympians, or at least veiled and withdrawn from
sight. To be able to live, the Greeks had, from
direst necessity, to create these gods : which
process we may perhaps picture to ourselves in
this manner : that out of the original Titan
thearchy of terror the Olympian thearchy of joy
was evolved, by slow transitions, through the
Apollonian impulse to beauty, even as roses break
forth from thorny bushes. How else could this
so sensitive people, so vehement in its desires, so
singularly qualified for suffering, have endured
existence, if it had not been exhibited to them
in their gods, surrounded with a higher glory ?
The same impulse which calls art into being, as
the complement and consummation of existence,
seducing to a continuation of life, caused also the
Olympian world to arise, in which the Hellenic
" will " held up before itself a transfiguring mirror.
Thus do the gods justify the life of man, in that
they themselves live it — the only satisfactory
Theodicy ! Existence under the bright sunshine

36 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

of such gods is regarded as that which is desirable
in itself, and the real grief of the Homeric men
has reference to parting from it, especially to
early parting : so that we might now say of them,
with a reversion of the Silenian wisdom, that " to
die early is worst of all for them, the second
worst is — some day to die at all." If once the
lamentation is heard, it will ring out again, of the
short-lived Achilles, of the leaf-like change and
vicissitude of the human race, of the decay of the
heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest
hero to long for a continuation of life, ay, even as
a day-labourer. So vehemently does the " will,"
at the Apollonian stage of development, long for
this existence, so completely at one does the
Homeric man feel himself with it, that the very
lamentation becomes its song of praise.

Here we must observe that this harmony which
is so eagerly contemplated by modern man, in
fact, this oneness of man with nature, to express
which Schiller introduced the technical term
" naive," is by no means such a simple, naturally
resulting and, as it were, inevitable condition,
which must be found at the gate of every culture
leading to a paradise of man : this could be
believed only by an age which sought to picture
to itself Rousseau's £mile also as an artist, and
imagined it had found in Homer such an artist
fimile, reared at Nature's bosom. Wherever we
meet with the "naive" in art, it behoves us to
recognise the highest effect of the Apollonian
culture, which in the first place has always to over
throw some Titanic empire and slay monsters, and

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 37

which, through powerful dazzling representations
and pleasurable illusions, must have trium )hed
over a terrible depth of world-contemplation ind
a most keen susceptibility to suffering. But how
seldom is the naive — that complete absorption in
the beauty of appearance — attained ! And hen:e
how inexpressibly sublime is Plomer, who, as un.t
being, bears the same relation to this Apollonian
folk-culture as the unit dream-artist does to the
dream-faculty of the people and of Nature in
general. The Homeric " naivete* " can be com
prehended only as the complete triumph of the
Apollonian illusion : it is the same kind of
illusion as Nature so frequently employs to
compass her ends. The true goal is veiled by a
phantasm : we stretch out our hands for the latter,
while Nature attains the former through our
illusion. In the Greeks the "will" desired to
contemplate itself in the transfiguration of the
genius and the world of art ; in order to glorify
themselves, its creatures had to feel themselves
worthy of glory ; they had to behold themselves
again in a higher sphere, without this consummate
world of contemplation acting as an imperative or
reproach. Such is the sphere of beauty, in which,
as in a mirror, they saw their images, the
Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty the
Hellenic will combated its talent — correlative to
the artistic — for suffering and for the wisdom of
suffering: and, as a monument of its victory,
Homer, the naive artist, stands before us.

38 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

4-

Concerning this naive artist the analogy of
dreams will enlighten us to some extent. When
w. realise to ourselves the dreamer, as, in the
midst of the illusion of the dream-world and with
out disturbing it, he calls out to himself: " it is a
dream, I will dream on " ; when we must thence
infer a deep inner joy in dream-contemplation ;
when, on the other hand, to be at all able to dream
with this inner joy in contemplation, we must have
completely forgotten the day and its terrible ob-
trusiveness, we may, under the direction of the
dream-reading Apollo, interpret all these phe
nomena to ourselves somewhat as follows. Though
it is certain that of the two halves of life, the
waking and the dreaming, the former appeals to
us as by far the more preferred, important, ex
cellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that
which alone is lived : yet, with reference to that
mysterious ground of our being of which we are
the phenomenon, I should, paradoxical as it may
seem, be inclined to maintain the very opposite
estimate of the value of dream life. For the more
clearly I perceive in nature those all-powerful
art impulses, and in them a fervent longing for
appearance, for redemption through appearance,
the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical
assumption that the Verily-Existent and Prim
ordial Unity, as the Eternally Suffering and Self-
Contradictory, requires the rapturous vision, the
joyful appearance, for its continuous salvation :
which appearance we, who are completely wrapt

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 39

in it and composed of it, must regard as the Verily
Non-existent, — i.e., as a perpetual unfolding in
time, space and causality, — in other words, as em
piric reality. If we therefore waive the consideration
of our own "reality" for the present, if we con
ceive our empiric existence, and that of the world
generally, as a representation of the Primordial
Unity generated every moment, we shall then have
to regard the dream as an appearance of appearance,
hence as a still higher gratification of the prim
ordial desire for appearance. It is for this same
reason that the innermost heart of Nature experi
ences that indescribable joy in the naive artist and
in the naive work of art, which is likewise only
" an appearance of appearance." In a symbolic
painting, Raphael, himself one of these immortal
" naive " ones, has represented to us this depoten-
tiating of appearance to appearance, the primordial
process of the naive artist and at the same time of
Apollonian culture. In his Transfiguration, the
lower half, with the possessed boy, the despairing
bearers, the helpless, terrified disciples, shows to
us the reflection of eternal primordial pain, the sole
basis of the world : the " appearance " here is the
counter-appearance of eternal Contradiction, the
father of things. Out of this appearance then
arises, like an ambrosial vapour, a visionlike new
world of appearances, of which those wrapt in the
first appearance see nothing — a radiant floating in
purest bliss and painless Contemplation beaming
from wide-open eyes. Here there is presented to
our view, in the highest symbolism of art, that
Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum,

40 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we comprehend,
by intuition, their necessary interdependence.
Apollo, however, again appears to us as the
apotheosis of the principium individuationis, in
which alone the perpetually attained end of the
Primordial Unity, its redemption through appear
ance, is consummated : he shows us, with sublime
attitudes, how the entire world of torment is
necessary, that thereby .the individual may be im
pelled to realise the redeeming vision, and then,
sunk in contemplation thereof, quietly sit in his
fluctuating barque, in the midst of the sea.

This apotheosis of individuation, if it be at all
conceived as imperative and laying down precepts,
knows but one law — the individual, i.e., the observ
ance of the boundaries of the individual, measure
in the Hellenic sense. Apollo, as ethical deity,
demands due proportion of his disciples, and, that
this may be observed, he demands self-knowledge.
And thus, parallel to the aesthetic necessity for
beauty, there run the demands " know thyself"
and " not too much," while presumption and
undueness are regarded as the truly hostile demons
of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as char
acteristics of the pre-Apollonian age, that of the
Titans, and of the extra- Apollonian world, that of
the barbarians. Because of his Titan-like love
for man, Prometheus had to be torn to pieces by
vultures ; because of his excessive wisdom, which
solved the riddle of the Sphinx, CEdipus had to
plunge into a bewildering vortex of monstrous
crimes : thus did the Delphic god interpret the
Grecian past.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 41

So also the effects wrought by the Dionysian
appeared " titanic " and " barbaric " to the Apol
lonian Greek : while at the same time he could not
conceal from himself that he too was inwardly
related to these overthrown Titans and heroes.
Indeed, he had to recognise still more than this:
his entire existence, with all its beauty and moder
ation, rested on a hidden substratum of suffering
and of knowledge, which was again disclosed to
him by the Dionysian. And lo ! Apollo could
not live without Dionysus ! The " titanic " and
the " barbaric " were in the end not less necessary
than the Apollonian. And now let us imagine to
ourselves how the ecstatic tone of the Dionysian
festival sounded in ever more luring and bewitching
strains into this artificially confined world built on
appearance and moderation, how in these strains
all the undueness of nature, in joy, sorrow, and
knowledge, even to the transpiercing shriek, became
audible : let us ask ourselves what meaning could
be attached to the psalmodising artist of Apollo,
with the phantom harp-sound, as compared with
this demonic folk-song ! The muses of the arts
of " appearance " paled before an art which, in its
intoxication, spoke the truth, the wisdom of Silenus
cried " woe ! woe ! " against the cheerful Olympians.
The individual, with all his boundaries and due
proportions, went under in the self-oblivion of the
Dionysian states and forgot the Apollonian pre
cepts. The Undueness revealed itself as truth,
contradiction, the bljssj^n_of_r)ain, declared itself
but of the heart of nature. And thus, wherever
the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was

42 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

routed and annihilated. But it is quite as certain
that, where the first assault was successfully with
stood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic
god exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing
than ever. For I can only explain to myself the
Doric state and Doric art as a permanent war-camp
of the Apollonian : only by incessant opposition
to the titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysian
was it possible for an art so defiantly-prim, so
encompassed with bulwarks, a training so warlike
and rigorous, a constitution so cruel and relentless,
to last for any length of time.

Up to this point we have enlarged upon the
observation made at the beginning of this essay :
how the Dionysian and the Apollonian, in ever
new births succeeding and mutually augmenting
one another, controlled the Hellenic genius : how
from out the age of " bronze," with its Titan
struggles and rigorous folk-philosophy, the Homeric
world develops under the fostering sway of the
Apollonian impulse to beauty, how this " naive "
splendour is again overwhelmed by the inbursting
flood of the Dionysian, and how against this new
power the Apollonian rises to the austere majesty
of Doric art and the Doric view of things. If,
then, in this way, in the strife of these two hostile
principles, the older Hellenic history falls into four
great periods of art, we are now driven to inquire
after the ulterior purpose of these unfoldings and
processes, unless perchance we should regard the
last-attained period, the period of Doric art, as the
end and aim of these artistic impulses : and here
the sublime and highly celebrated art-work of

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 43

Attic tragedy and dramatic dithyramb presents
itself to our view as the common goal of both
these impulses, whose mysterious union, after
many and long precursory struggles, found its
glorious consummation in such a child, — which is
at once Antigone and Cassandra,

5-

We now approach the real purpose of our in
vestigation, which aims at acquiring a knowledge
of the Dionyso-Apollonian genius and his art
work, or at least an anticipatory understanding of
the mystery of the aforesaid union. Here we
shall ask first of all where that new germ which
subsequently developed into tragedy and dramatic
dithyramb first makes itself perceptible in the
Hellenic world. The ancients themselves supply
the answer in symbolic form, when they place
Homer and Archilochus as the forefathers and
torch-bearers of Greek poetry side by side on
gems, sculptures, etc., in the sure conviction that
only these two thoroughly original compeers, from
whom a stream of fire flows over the whole of
Greek posterity, should be taken into considera
tion. Homer, the aged dreamer sunk in himself,
the type of the Apollonian naive artist, beholds
now with astonishment the impassioned genius of
the warlike votary of the muses, Archilochus,
violently tossed to and fro on the billows of exist
ence : and modern aesthetics could only add by
way of interpretation, that here the " objective "
artist is confronted by the first " subjective " artist.

44 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

But this interpretation is of little service to us,
because we know the subjective artist only as the
poor artist, and in every type and elevation of
art we demand specially and first of all the con
quest of the Subjective, the redemption from the
" ego " and the cessation of every individual will
and desire ; indeed, we find it impossible to believe
in any truly artistic production, however insignifi
cant, without objectivity, without pure, interestless
contemplation. Hence our aesthetics must first
solve the problem as to how the " lyrist " is
possible as an artist : he who according to the
experience of all ages continually says " 1 " and
sings off to us the entire chromatic scale of his
passions and desires. This very Archilochus
appals us, alongside of Homer, by his cries of hatred
and scorn, by the drunken outbursts of his desire.
Is not just he then, who has been called the first
subjective artist, the non-artist proper? But
whence then the reverence which was shown to
him — the poet — in very remarkable utterances by
the Delphic oracle itself, the focus of "objective"
art?

Schiller has enlightened us concerning his poetic
procedure by a psychological observation, inexplic
able to himself, yet not apparently open to any
objection. He acknowledges that as the prepara
tory state to the act of poetising he had not
perhaps before him or within him a series of
pictures with co-ordinate causality of thoughts, but
rather a musical mood (" The perception with me
is at first without a clear and definite object ; this
torms itself later. A certain musical mood of

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 45

mind precedes, and only after this does the poetical
idea follow with me."). Add to this the most im
portant phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry,
the union, regarded everywhere as natural, of the
lyrist with the musician, their very identity, indeed,
— compared with which our modern lyric poetry
is like the statue of a god without a head, — and
we may now, on the basis of our metaphysics of
aesthetics set forth above, interpret the lyrist to
ourselves as follows. As Dionysian artist he is
in the first place become altogether one with the
Primordial Unity, its pain and contradiction, and
he produces the copy of this Primordial Unity as
music, granting that music has been correctly
termed a repetition and a recast of the world ;
but now, under the Apollonian dream-inspiration,
this music again becomes visible to him as in a
symbolic dream-picture. The formless and in
tangible reflection of the primordial pain in music,
with its redemption in appearance, then generates
a second mirroring as a concrete symbol or
example. The artist has already surrendered his
subjectivity in the Dionysian process : the picture
which now shows to him his oneness with the
heart of the world, is a dream-scene, which em
bodies the primordial contradiction and primordial
pain, together with the primordial joy, of appear
ance. The " I " of the lyrist sounds therefore
from the abyss of being : its " subjectivity," in the
sense of the modern aesthetes, is a fiction. When
Archilochus, the first lyrist of the Greeks, makes
known both his mad love and his contempt to the
daughters of Lycambes, it is not his passion which

46 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

dances before us in orgiastic frenzy : we see
Dionysus and the Maenads, we see the drunken
reveller Archilochus sunk down to sleep — as
Euripides depicts it in the Bacchae, the sleep on
the high Alpine pasture, in the noonday sun : —
and now Apollo approaches and touches him with
the laurel. The Dionyso-musical enchantment of
the sleeper now emits, as it were, picture sparks,
lyrical poems, which in their highest development
are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.

The plastic artist, as also the epic poet, who is
related to him, is sunk in the pure contemplation
of pictures. The Dionysian musician is, without
any picture, himself just primordial pain and the
primordial re-echoing thereof. The lyric genius
is conscious of a world of pictures and symbols —
growing out of the state of mystical self-abnega
tion and oneness, — which has a colouring causality
and velocity quite different from that of the world
of the plastic artist and epic poet. While the
latter lives in these pictures, and only in them,
with joyful satisfaction, and never grows tired
of contemplating them with love, even in their
minutest characters, while even the picture of the
angry Achilles is to him but a picture, the angry
expression of which he enjoys with the dream-
joy in appearance — so that, by this mirror of
appearance, he is guarded against being unified
and blending with his figures ; — the pictures of
the lyrist on the other hand are nothing but his
very self and, as it were, only different projections
of himself, on account of which he as the moving
centre of this world is entitled to say " I " : only

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 47

of course this self is not the same as that of the
waking, empirically real man, but the only verily
existent and eternal self resting at the basis of
things, by means of the images whereof the lyric
genius sees through even to this basis of things.
Now let us suppose that he beholds himself also
among these images as non-genius, i.e., his subject,
the whole throng of subjective passions and im
pulses of the will directed to a definite object
which appears real to him ; if now it seems as if
the lyric genius and the allied non-genius were
one, and as if the former spoke that little word
" I " of his own accord, this appearance will no
longer be able to lead us astray, as it certainly
led those astray who designated the lyrist as the
subjective poet. In truth, Archilochus, the pas
sionately inflamed, loving and hating man, is but
a vision of the genius, who by this time is no
longer Archilochus, but a genius of the world, who
expresses his primordial pain symbolically in the
figure of the man Archilochus : while the subject
ively willing and desiring man, Archilochus, can
never at any time be a poet. It is by no means
necessary, however, that the lyrist should see
nothing but the phenomenon of the man Archi
lochus before him as a reflection of eternal being ;
and tragedy shows how far the visionary world of
the lyrist may depart from this phenomenon, to
which, of course, it is most intimately related.

§cjw£ejihau*r, who did not shut his eyes to the
difficulty presented by the lyrist in the philo
sophical contemplation of art, thought he had
found a way out of it, on which, however, I can-

48 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

not accompany him ; while he alone, in his pro
found metaphysics of music, held in his hands the
means whereby this difficulty could be definitely
removed : as I believe I have removed it here in
his spirit and to his honour. In contrast to our
view, he describes the peculiar nature of song as
follows * ( Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I.
295) : — " It is the subject of the will, i.e., his own
volition, which fills the consciousness of the singer ;
often as an unbound and satisfied desire (joy),
but still more often as a restricted desire (grief),
always as an emotion, a passion, or an agitated
frame of mind. Besides this, however, and along
with it, by the sight of surrounding nature, the
singer becomes conscious of himself as the subject
of pure will-less knowing, the unbroken, blissful
peace of which now appears, in contrast to the
stress of desire, which is always restricted and
always needy. The feeling of this contrast, this
alternation, is really what the song as a whole
expresses and what principally constitutes the
lyrical state of mind. In it pure knowing comes
to us as it were to deliver us from desire and
the stress thereof: we follow, but only for an
instant ; for desire, the remembrance of our
personal ends, tears us anew from peaceful con
templation ; yet ever again the next beautiful
surrounding in which the pure will-less knowledge
presents itself to us, allures us away from desire.
Therefore, in song and in the lyrical mood, desire

* World as Will and Idea, I. 323, 4th ed. of Haldane
and Kemp's translation. Quoted with a few changes.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 49

(the personal interest of the ends) and the pure
perception of the surrounding which presents itself,
are wonderfully mingled with each other; con
nections between them are sought for and ima
gined ; the subjective disposition, the affection of
the will, imparts its own hue to the contemplated
surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings com
municate the reflex of their colour to the will.
The true song is the expression of the whole of
this mingled and divided state of mind."

Who could fail to see in this description that
lyric poetry is here characterised as an imperfectly
attained art, which seldom and only as it were in
leaps arrives at its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, the
essence of which is said to consist in this, that desire
and pure contemplation, i.e., the unasthetic and the
aesthetic condition, are wonderfully mingled with
each other ? We maintain rather, that this entire
antithesis, according to which, as according to
some standard of value, Schopenhauer, too, still
classifies the arts, the antithesis between the
subjective and the objective, is quite out of place
in aesthetics, inasmuch as the subject, i.e.t the
desiring individual who furthers his own egoistic
ends, can be conceived only as the adversary, not
as the origin of art. In so far as the subject is
the artist, however, he has already been released
from his individual will, and has become as it
were the medium, through which the one verily
existent Subject celebrates his redemption in
appearance. For this one thing must above all
be clear to us, to our humiliation and exaltation,
that the entire comedy of art is not at all per-
D

50 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

formed, say, for our betterment and culture, and
that we are just as little the true authors of this
art-world : rather we may assume with regard to
ourselves, that its true author uses us as pictures
and artistic projections, and that we have our
highest dignity in our significance as works of art
— for only as an (esthetic phenomenon is existence
and the world eternally justified: — while of course
our consciousness of this our specific significance
hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which
the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle
represented thereon. Hence all our knowledge
of art is at bottom quite illusory, because, as
knowing persons we are not one and identical
with the Being who, as the sole author and spec
tator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual
entertainment for himself. Only in so far as the
genius in the act of artistic production coalesces
with this primordial artist of the world, does he
get a glimpse of the eternal essence of art, for in
this state he is, in a marvellous manner, like the
weird picture of the fairy-tale which can at will
turn its eyes and behold itself; he is now at once
subject and object', at once poet, actor, and spec
tator.

6.

With reference to Archilochus, it has been
established by critical research that he introduced
the folk-song into literature, and, on account
thereof, deserved, according to the general estimate
of the Greeks, his unique position alongside of
Homer. But what is this popular folk-song in

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 5 1

contrast to the wholly Apollonian epos? What
else but the perpetuum vestigium of a union of the
Apollonian and the Dionysian ? Its enormous
diffusion among all peoples, still further enhanced
by ever new births, testifies to the power of this
artistic double impulse of nature : which leaves its
vestiges in the popular song in like manner as the
orgiastic movements of a people perpetuate them
selves in its music. Indeed, one might also
furnish historical proofs, that every period which
is highly productive in popular songs has been
most violently stirred by Dionysian currents, which
we must always regard as the substratum and
prerequisite of the popular song.

First of all, however, we regard the popular
song as the musical mirror of the world, as the
original melody, which now seeks for itself a
parallel dream-phenomenon and expresses it in
poetry. Melody is therefore primary and universal,
and as such may admit of several objectivations,
in several texts. Likewise, in the naive estima
tion of the people, it is regarded as by far the
more important and necessary. Melody generates
the poem out of itself by an ever-recurring pro
cess. The strophic form of the popular song points
to the same phenomenon, which I always beheld
with astonishment, till at last I found this explana
tion. Any one who in accordance with this theory •
examines a collection of popular songs, such as
14 Des Knaben Wunderhorn," will find innumer
able instances of the perpetually productive
melody scattering picture sparks all around :
which in their variegation, their abrupt change,

52 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

their mad precipitance, manifest a power quite
unknown to the epic appearance and its steady
flow. From the point of view of the epos, this un
equal and irregular pictorial world of lyric poetry
must be simply condemned : and the solemn
epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian festivals in
the age of Terpander have certainly done so.

Accordingly, we observe that in the poetising
of the popular song, language is strained to its
utmost to imitate music \ and hence a new world
of poetry begins with Archilochus, which is fun
damentally opposed to the Homeric. And in
saying this we have pointed out the only possible
relation between poetry and music, between word
and tone : the word, the picture, the concept here
seeks an expression analogous to music and now
experiences in itself the power of music. In
this sense we may discriminate between two main
currents in the history of the language of the
Greek people, according as their language imitated
either the world of phenomena and of pictures, or
the world of music. One has only to reflect
seriously on the linguistic difference with regard
to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary in
Homer and Pindar, in order to comprehend the
significance of this contrast ; indeed, it becomes
palpably clear to us that in the period between
Homer and Pindar the orgiastic flute tones of
Olympus must have sounded forth, which, in an
age as late as Aristotle's, when music was infinitely
more developed, transported people to drunken en
thusiasm, and which, when their influence was first
felt, undoubtedly incited all the poetic means of

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 53

expression of contemporaneous man to imitation.
I here call attention to a familiar phenomenon of
our own times, against which our aesthetics raises
many objections. We again and again have
occasion to observe how a symphony of Beethoven
compels the individual hearers to use figurative
speech, though the appearance presented by a
collocation of the different pictorial world generated
by a piece of music may be never so fantastically
diversified and even contradictory. To practise
its small wit on such compositions, and to overlook
a phenomenon which is certainly worth explaining,
is quite in keeping with this aesthetics. Indeed,
even if the tone-poet has spoken in pictures con
cerning a composition, when for instance he
designates a certain symphony as the " pastoral "
symphony, or a passage therein as " the scene by
the brook," or another as the " merry gathering
of rustics," these are likewise only symbolical
representations born out of music — and not perhaps
the imitated objects of music — representations
which can give us no information whatever con
cerning the Dionysian content of music, and which
in fact have no distinctive value of their own
alongside of other pictorical expressions. This
process of a discharge of music in pictures we have
now to transfer to some youthful, linguistically
productive people, to get a notion as to how
the strophic popular song originates, and how the
entire faculty of speech is stimulated by this new
principle of imitation of music.

If, therefore, we may regard lyric poetry as the
effulguration of music in pictures and concepts,

54 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

we can now ask : " how does music appear in
the mirror of symbolism and conception ? " //
appears as will, taking the word in the Schopen-
hauerian sense, i.e., as the antithesis of the aesthetic,
purely contemplative, and passive frame of mind.
Here, however, we must discriminate as sharply
as possible between the concept of essentiality
and the concept of phenominality ; for music,
according to its essence, cannot be will, because
as such it would have to be wholly banished
from the domain of art — for the will is the
unaesthetic-in-itself ; — yet it appears as will. For
in order to express the phenomenon of music in
pictures, the lyrist requires all the stirrings of
passion, from the whispering of infant desire to
the roaring of madness. Under the impulse
to speak of music in Apollonian symbols, he con
ceives of all nature, and himself therein, only as
the eternally willing, desiring, longing existence.
But in so far as he interprets music by means
of pictures, he himself rests in the quiet calm
of Apollonian contemplation, however much all
around him which he beholds through the medium
of music is in a state of confused and violent
motion. Indeed, when he beholds himself through
this same medium, his own image appears to him
in a state of unsatisfied feeling : his own willing,
longing, moaning and rejoicing are to him symbols
by which he interprets music. Such is the phenom
enon of the lyrist : as Apollonian genius he in
terprets music through the image of the will, while
he himself, completely released from the avidity
of the will, is the pure, undimmed eye of day.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 55

Our whole disquisition insists on this, that
lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music
just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty
does not require the picture and the concept, but
only endures them as accompaniments. The
poems of the lyrist can express nothing which has
not already been contained in the vast universality
and absoluteness of the music which compelled
him to use figurative speech. By no means is it
possible for language adequately to render the
cosmic symbolism of music, for the very reason
that music stands in symbolic relation to the
primordial contradiction and primordial pain in
the heart of the Primordial Unity, and _tkcrefore
symbolises a sphere which is above all appearance
and before all phenomena. Rather should we
say that all phenomena, compared with it, are
but symbols : hence language, as the organ and
symbol of phenomena, cannot at all disclose the
innermost essence of music ; language can only
be in superficial contact with music when it
attempts to imitate music ; while the profoundest
significance of the latter cannot be brought one
step nearer to us by all the eloquence of lyric
poetry.

7-

We shall now have to avail ourselves of all the
principles of art hitherto considered, in order to
find our way through the labyrinth, as we must
designate the origin of Greek tragedy. I shall
not be charged with absurdity in saying that the

56 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

problem of this origin has as yet not even been
seriously stated, not to say solved, however often
the fluttering tatters of ancient tradition have
been sewed together in sundry combinations and
torn asunder again. This tradition tells us in
the most unequivocal terms, that tragedy sprang
from the tragic chorus ', and was originally only
chorus and nothing but chorus : and hence we
feel it our duty to look into the heart of this
tragic chorus as being the real proto-drama,
without in the least contenting ourselves with
current art-phraseology — according to which the
chorus is the ideal spectator, or represents the
people in contrast to the regal side of the scene.
The latter explanatory notion, which sounds
sublime to many a politician — that the immutable
moral law was embodied by the democratic
Athenians in the popular chorus, which always
carries its point over the passionate excesses and
extravagances of kings — may be ever so forcibly
suggested by an observation of Aristotle : still
it has no bearing on the original formation of
tragedy, inasmuch as the entire antithesis of king
and people, and, in general, the whole politico-
social sphere, is excluded from the purely religious
beginnings of tragedy ; but, considering the well-
known classical form of the chorus in ^Eschylus
and Sophocles, we should even deem it blasphemy
to speak here of the anticipation of a " constitu
tional representation of the people," from which
blasphemy others have not shrunk, however. The
ancient governments knew of no constitutional
representation of the people in praxi, and it is to

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 57

be hoped that they did not even so much as
" anticipate " it in tragedy.

Much more celebrated than this political ex
planation of the chorus is the notion of A. W.
Schickel, who advises us to regard the chorus, in
a manner, as the essence and extract of the crowd
of spectators, — as the " ideal spectator." This view
when compared with the historical tradition that
tragedy was originally only chorus, reveals itself
in its true character, as a crude, unscientific, yet
brilliant assertion, which, however, has acquired its
brilliancy only through its concentrated form of
expression, through the truly Germanic bias in
favour of whatever is called " ideal," and through
our momentary astonishment. For we are indeed
astonished the moment we compare our well-known
theatrical public with this chorus, and ask our
selves if it could ever be possible to idealise some
thing analogous to the Greek chorus out of such a
public. We tacitly deny this, and now wonder as
much at the boldness of Schlegel's assertion as at
the totally different nature of the Greek public.
For hitherto we always believed that the true
spectator, be he who he may, had always to re
main conscious of having before him a work of
art, and not an empiric reality : whereas the tragic
chorus of the Greeks is compelled to recognise
real beings in the figures of the stage. The chorus
of the Ocean ides really believes that it sees before
it the Titan Prometheus, and considers itself as
real as the god of the scene. And are we to own
that he is the highest and purest type of spectator,
who, like the Ocean ides, regards Prometheus as

58 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

real and present in body ? And is it characteristic
of the ideal spectator that he should run on the
stage and free the god from his torments ? We
had believed in an aesthetic public, and considered
the individual spectator the better qualified the
more he was capable of viewing a work of art as
art, that is, aesthetically ; but now the Schlegelian
expression has intimated to us, that the perfect
ideal spectator does not at all suffer the world of
the scenes to act aesthetically on him, but corporeo-
empirically. Oh, these Greeks ! we have sighed ;
they will upset our aesthetics ! But once accus
tomed to it, we have reiterated the saying of
Schlegel, as often as the subject of the chorus has
been broached.

But the tradition which is so explicit here speaks
against Schlegel : the chorus as such, without the
stage, — the primitive form of tragedy, — and the
chorus of ideal spectators do not harmonise. What
kind of art would that be which was extracted from
the concept of the spectator, and whereof we are
to regard the " spectator as such " as the true
form ? The spectator without the play is some
thing absurd. We fear that the birth of tragedy
can be explained neither by the high esteem for
the moral intelligence of the multitude nor by the
concept of the spectator without the play ; and we
regard the problem as too deep to be even so
much as touched by such superficial modes of
contemplation.

An infinitely more valuable insight into the
signification of the chorus had already been dis
played by Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 59

Bride of Messina, where he regarded the chorus as
a living wall which tragedy draws round herself to
guard her from contact with the world of reality,
and to preserve her ideal domain and poetical
freedom.

It is with this, his chief weapon, that Schiller
combats the ordinary conception of the natural,
the illusion ordinarily required in dramatic poetry.
He contends that while indeed the day on the stage
is merely artificial, the architecture only sym
bolical, and the metrical dialogue purely ideal in
character, nevertheless an erroneous view still
prevails in the main : that it is not enough to
tolerate merely as a poetical license that which is
in reality the essence of all poetry. The intro
duction of the chorus is, he says, the decisive step
by which war is declared openly and honestly
against all naturalism in art. — It is, methinks, for
disparaging this mode of contemplation that our
would-be superior age has coined the disdainful
catchword " pseudo-idealism." I fear, however,
that we on the other hand with our present worship
of the natural and the real have landed at the
nadir of all idealism, namely in the region of
cabinets of wax-figures. An art indeed exists
also here, as in certain novels much in vogue at
present : but let no one pester us with the claim
that by this art the Schiller-Goethian " Pseudo-
idealism " has been vanquished.

It is indeed an " ideal " domain, as Schiller
rightly perceived, upon which the Greek satyric
chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy, was wont
to walk, a domain raised far above the actual path

60 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

of mortals. The Greek framed for this chorus
the suspended scaffolding of a fictitious natural
state and placed thereon fictitious natural beings.
It is on this foundation that tragedy grew up, and
so it could of course dispense from the very first
with a painful portrayal of reality. Yet it is not an
arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt heaven
and earth ; rather is it a world possessing the same
reality and trustworthiness that Olympus with its
dwellers possessed for the believing Hellene.
The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives
in a religiously acknowledged reality under the
sanction of the myth and cult. That tragedy
begins with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of
tragedy speaks through him, is just as surprising a
phenomenon to us as, in general, the derivation of
tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we shall get a
starting-point for our inquiry, if I put forward the
proposition that the satyr, the fictitious natural
being, is to the man of culture what Dionysian
music is to civilisation. Concerning this latter,
Richard Wagner says that it is neutralised by
music even as lamplight by daylight. In like
manner, I believe, the Greek man of culture felt
himself neutralised in the presence of the satyric
chorus : and this is the most immediate effect of
the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society,
and, in general, the gaps between man and man
give way to an overwhelming feeling of oneness,
which leads back to the heart of nature. The
metaphysical comfort, — with which, as I have here
intimated, every true tragedy dismisses us — that,
in spite of the perpetual change of phenomena,

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 6l

life at bottom is indestructibly powerful and
pleasurable, this comfort appears with corporeal
lucidity as the satyric chorus, as the chorus of
natural beings, who live ineradicable as it were
behind all civilisation, and who, in spite of the
ceaseless change of generations and the history of
nations, remain for ever the same.

With this chorus the deep-minded Hellene, who
is so singularly qualified for the most delicate and
severe suffering, consoles himself: — he who has
glanced with piercing eye into the very heart of
the terrible destructive processes of so-called uni
versal history, as also into the cruelty of nature,
and is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic
negation of the will. Art saves him, and through
art life saves him — for herself.

For we must know that in the rapture of the
Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the
ordinary bounds and limits of existence, there is
a lethargic element, wherein all personal experi
ences of the past are submerged. It is by this
gulf of oblivion that the everyday world and the
world of Dionysian reality are separated from each
other. But as soon as this everyday reality rises
again in consciousness, it is felt as such, and
nauseates us ; an ascetic will-paralysing mood is
the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dio
nysian man may be said to resemble Hamlet : both
have for once seen into the true nature of things,
- -they have perceived, but they are loath to act ;
for their action cannot change the eternal nature
of things ; they regard it as shameful or ridiculous
that one should require of them to set aright the

62 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills
action, action requires the veil of illusion — it is
this lesson which Hamlet teaches, and not the
cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams who from too
much reflection, as it were from a surplus of
possibilities, does not arrive at action at all. Not
reflection, no ! — true knowledge, insight into appal
ling truth, preponderates over all motives inciting
to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian
man. No comfort avails any longer ; his longing
goes beyond a world after death, beyond the gods
themselves ; existence with its glittering reflection
in the gods, or in an immortal other world is ab
jured. In the consciousness of the truth he has
perceived, man now sees everywhere only the
awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now
understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia,
he now discerns the wrisdom of the sylvan god
Silenus : and loathing seizes him.

Here, in this extremest danger of the will, art
approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress ;
she alone is able to transform these nauseating
reflections on the awfulness or absurdity of exist
ence into representations wherewith it is possible
to live : these are the representations of the
sublime as the artistic subjugation of the/awful,
and the comic as the artistic delivery from the
nausea of the absurd. The satyric chorus of
dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art ; the
paroxysms described above spent their force in
the intermediary world of these Dionysian
followers.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 63

8.

The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our more
recent time, is the offspring of a longing after the
Primitive and the Natural ; but mark with what
firmness and fearlessness the Greek embraced the
man of the woods, and again, how coyly and
mawkishly the modern man dallied with the
flattering picture of a tender, flute-playing, soft-
natured shepherd ! Nature, on which as yet no
knowledge has been at work, which maintains
unbroken barriers to culture — this is what the
Greek saw in his satyr, which still was not on
this account supposed to coincide with the ape.
On the contrary : it was the archetype of man,
the embodiment of his highest and strongest
emotions, as the enthusiastic reveller enraptured
by the proximity of his god, as the fellow-suffering
companion in whom the suffering of the god re
peats itself, as the herald of wisdom speaking from
the very depths of nature, as the emblem of the
sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek
was wont to contemplate with reverential awe.
The satyr was something sublime and godlike : he
could not but appear so, especially to the sad and
wearied eye of the Dionysian man. He would
have been offended by our spurious tricked-up
shepherd, while his eye dwelt with sublime satis
faction on the naked and unstuntedly magnificent
characters of nature : here the illusion of culture
was brushed away from the archetype of man ;
here the true man, the bearded satyr, revealed
himself, who shouts joyfully to his god. Hcfore

64 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

him the cultured man shrank to a lying caricature.
Schiller is right also with reference to these
beginnings of tragic art : the chorus is a living
bulwark against the onsets of reality, because it
— the satyric chorus — portrays existence more
truthfully, more realistically, more perfectly than
the cultured man who ordinarily considers him
self as the only reality. The sphere of poetry
does not lie outside the world, like some fantastic
impossibility of a poet's imagination : it seeks to
be the very opposite, the unvarnished expression
of truth, and must for this very reason cast aside
the false finery of that supposed reality of the
cultured man. The contrast between this intrinsic
truth of nature and the falsehood of culture, which
poses as the only reality, is similar to that existing
between the eternal kernel of things, the thing in
itself, and the collective world of phenomena.
And even as tragedy, with its metaphysical com
fort, points to the eternal life of this kernel of
existence, notwithstanding the perpetual dissolu
tion of phenomena, so the symbolism of the
satyric chorus already expresses figuratively this
primordial relation between the thing in itself
and phenomenon. The idyllic shepherd of the
modern man is but a copy of the sum of the
illusions of culture which he calls nature ; the
Dionysian Greek desires truth and nature in their
most potent form ; — he sees himself metamor
phosed into the satyr.

The revelling crowd of the votaries of Dionysus
rejoices, swayed by sucn moods and perceptions,
the power of which transforms them before their

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 65

own eyes, so that they imagine they behold them
selves as reconstituted genii of nature, as satyrs.
The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the
artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon, which
of course required a separation of the Dionysian
spectators from the enchanted Dionysians. How
ever, we must never lose sight of the fact that
the public of the Attic tragedy rediscovered itself
in the chorus of the orchestra, that there was in
reality no antithesis of public and chorus : for all
was but one great sublime chorus of dancing and
singing satyrs, or of such as allowed themselves
to be represented by the satyrs. The Schlegelian
observation must here reveal itself to us in a
deeper sense. The chorus is the "ideal spectator "*
in so far as it is the only beholder ft the beholder
of the visionary world of the scene. A public of
spectators, as known to us, was unknown to the
Greeks. In their theatres the terraced structure
of the spectators' space rising in concentric arcs
enabled every one, in the strictest sense, to overlook
the entire world of culture around him, and in
surfeited contemplation to imagine himself a
chorist. According to this view, then, we may
call the chorus in its primitive stage in proto-
tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian man :
a phenomenon which may be best exemplified
by the process of the actor, who, if he be truly
gifted, sees hovering before his eyes with almost
tangible perceptibility the character he is to
represent. The satyric chorus is first of all a

* Zuschauer. t Schauer.

66 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

vision of the Dionysian throng, just as the world
of the stage is, in turn, a vision of the satyric
chorus : the power of this vision is great enough
to render the eye dull and insensible to the
impression of " reality," to the presence of the
cultured men occupying the tiers of seats on every
side. The form of the Greek theatre reminds one
of a lonesome mountain-valley : the architecture
of the scene appears like a luminous cloud-picture
which the Bacchants swarming on the mountains
behold from the heights, as the splendid encircle
ment in the midst of which the image of Dionysus
is revealed to them.

Owing to our learned conception of the ele
mentary artistic processes, this artistic proto-
phenomenon, which is here introduced to explain
the tragic chorus, is almost shocking : while
nothing can be more certain than that the poet
is a poet only in that he beholds himself sur
rounded by forms which live and act before him,
into the innermost being of which his glance
penetrates. By reason of a strange defeat in our
capacities, we modern men are apt to represent
to ourselves the aesthetic proto-phenomenon as
too complex and abstract. For the true poet
the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure, but a
vicarious image which actually hovers before him
in place of a concept. The character is not for
him an aggregate composed of a studied collection
of particular traits, but an irrepressibly live person
appearing before his eyes, and differing only from
the corresponding vision of the painter by its
ever continued life and action. Why is it that

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 67

Homer sketches much more vividly * than all the
other poets? Because he contemplates f much
more. We talk so abstractly about poetry,
because we are all wont to be bad poets. At
bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple : let a
man but have the faculty of perpetually seeing a
lively play and of constantly living surrounded
by hosts of spirits, then he is a poet : let him but
feel the impulse to transform himself and to talk
from out the bodies and souls of others, then he
is a dramatist.

The Dionysian excitement is able to impart to
a whole mass of men this artistic faculty of seeing
themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits,
with whom they know themselves to be inwardly
one. This function of the tragic chorus is the
*/ttzwtf/&rproto-phenomenon: to see one's self trans
formed before one's self, and then to act as if one
had really entered into another body, into another
character. This function stands at the beginning
of the development of the drama. Here we have
something different from the rhapsodist, who does
not blend with his pictures, but only sees them,
like the painter, with contemplative eye outside
of him ; here we actually have a surrender of the
individual by his entering into another nature.
Moreover this phenomenon appears in the form
of an epidemic : a whole throng feels itself
metamorphosed in this wise. Hence it is that the
dithyramb is essentially different from every other
variety of the choric song. The virgins, who with

* Anschaulicher. tAnschaut.

68 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

laurel twigs in their hands solemnly proceed to
the temple of Apollo and sing a processional
hymn, remain what they are and retain their
civic names : the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus
of transformed beings, whose civic past and social
rank are totally forgotten : they have become the
timeless servants of their god that live aloof from
all the spheres of society. Every other variety
of the choric lyric of the Hellenes is but an
enormous enhancement of the Apollonian unit-
singer : while in the dithyramb we have before us
a community of unconscious actors, who mutually
regard themselves as transformed among one
another.

This enchantment is the prerequisite of all
dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian
reveller sees himself as a satyr, and as satyr he in
turn beholds the god, that is, in his transformation
he sees a new vision outside him as the Apollonian
consummation of his state. With this new vision
the drama is complete.

According to this view, we must understand
Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, which
always disburdens itself anew in an Apollonian
world of pictures. The choric parts, therefore,
with which tragedy is interlaced, are in a manner
the mother-womb of the entire so-called dialogue,
that is, of the whole stage-world, of the drama
proper. In several successive outbursts does this
primordial basis of tragedy beam forth the vision
of the drama, which is a dream-phenomenon
throughout, and, as such, epic in character: on
the other hand, however, as objectivation of a

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 69

Dionysian state, it does not represent the Apol
lonian redemption in appearance, but, conversely,
the dissolution of the individual and his unifica
tion with primordial existence. Accordingly, the
drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian
perceptions and influences, and is thereby separated
from the epic as by an immense gap.

The chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the
mass of the people moved by Dionysian excite
ment, is thus fully explained by our conception of
it as here set forth. Whereas, being accustomed
to the position of a chorus on the modern stage,
especially an operatic chorus, we could never
comprehend why the tragic chorus of the Greeks
should be older, more primitive, indeed, more
important than the " action " proper, — as has been
so plainly declared by the voice of tradition ;
whereas, furthermore, we could not reconcile with
this traditional paramount importance and primi-
tiveness the fact of the chorus' being composed
only of humble, ministering beings ; indeed, at
first only of goatlike satyrs ; whereas, finally, the
orchestra before the scene was always a riddle to
us ; we have learned to comprehend at length that
the scene, together with the action, was funda
mentally and originally conceived only as a vision,
that the only reality is just the chorus, which of
itself generates the vision and speaks thereof with
the entire symbolism of dancing, tone, and word.
This chorus beholds in the vision its lord and
master Dionysus, and is thus for ever the serving
chorus : it sees how he, the god, suffers and
glorifies himself, and therefore docs not itself act.

7O THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

But though its attitude towards the god is through
out the attitude of ministration, this is never
theless the highest expression, the Dionysian
expression of Nature, and therefore, like Nature
herself, the chorus utters oracles and wise sayings
when transported with enthusiasm : as fellow-
sufferer it is also the sage proclaiming truth from
out the heart of Nature. Thus, then, originates
the fantastic figure, which seems so shocking,
of the wise and enthusiastic satyr, who is at
the same time " the dumb man " in contrast to
the god : the image of Nature and her strongest
impulses, yea, the symbol of Nature, and at the
same time the herald of her art and wisdom :
musician, poet, dancer, and visionary in one
person.

Agreeably to this view, and agreeably to
tradition, Dionysus, the proper stage-hero and
focus of vision, is not at first actually present in
the oldest period of tragedy, but is only imagined
as present : i.e., tragedy is originally only " chorus "
and not " drama." Later on the attempt is made
to exhibit the god as real and to display the
visionary figure together with its glorifying en
circlement before the eyes of all ; it is here that
the " drama " in the narrow sense of the term
begins. To the dithyrambic chorus is now as
signed the task of exciting the minds of the
hearers to such a pitch of Dionysian frenzy, that,
when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they
do not behold in him, say, the unshapely masked
man, but a visionary figure, born as it were of
their own ecstasy. Let us picture Admetes think-

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 71

ing in profound meditation of his lately departed
wife Alcestis, and quite consuming himself in
spiritual contemplation thereof — when suddenly
the veiled figure of a woman resembling her in
form and gait is led towards him : let us picture
his sudden trembling anxiety, his agitated com
parisons, his instinctive conviction — and we shall
have an analogon to the sensation with which the
spectator, excited to Dionysian frenzy, saw the
god approaching on the stage, a god with whose
sufferings he had already become identified. lie
involuntarily transferred the entire picture of the
god, fluttering magically before his soul, to this
masked figure and resolved its reality as it were
into a phantasmal unreality. This is the
Apollonian dream-state, in which the world of
day is veiled, and a new world, clearer, more
intelligible, more striking than the former, and
nevertheless more shadowy, is ever born anew in
perpetual change before our eyes. We accordingly
recognise in tragedy a thorough-going stylistic
contrast : the language, colour, flexibility and
dynamics of the dialogue fall apart in the
Uionysian lyrics of the chorus on the one hand,
and in the Apollonian dream-world of the scene
on the other, into entirely separate spheres of
expression. The Apollonian appearances, in
which Dionysus objectifies himself, are no longer
" ein ewiges Mecr, ein wechselnd Weben, ein
gluhend Leben," * as is the music of the chorus,

* An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing, Life, all glowing.
Faust, trans, of Bayard Taylor.— TK.

72 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

they are no longer the forces merely felt, but not
condensed into a picture, by which the inspired
votary of Dionysus divines the proximity of his
god : the clearness and firmness of epic form now
speak to him from the scene, Dionysus now no
longer speaks through forces, but as an epic hero,
almost in the language of Homer.

9-

Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of
the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, appears
simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the
dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature
reveals itself in the dance, because in the dance
the greatest energy is merely potential, but betrays
itself nevertheless in flexible and vivacious move
ments. The language of the Sophoclean heroes,
for instance, surprises us by its Apollonian pre
cision and clearness, so that we at once imagine we
see into the innermost recesses of their being, and
marvel not a little that the way to these recesses
is so short. But if for the moment we disregard
the character of the hero which rises to the surface
and grows visible — and which at bottom is nothing
but the light-picture cast on a dark wall, that is,
appearance through and through, — if rather we
enter into the myth which projects itself in these
bright mirrorings, we shall of a sudden experience
a phenomenon which bears a reverse relation to
one familiar in optics. When, after a vigorous
effort to gaze into the sun, we turn away blinded,

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 73

we have dark-coloured spots before our eyes as
restoratives, so to speak ; while, on the contrary,
those light-picture phenomena of the Sophoclean
hero, — in short, the Apollonian of the mask, — are
the necessary productions of a glance into the
secret and terrible things of nature, as it were
shining spots to heal the eye which dire night
has seared. Only in this sense can we hope to be
able to grasp the true meaning of the serious and
significant notion of " Greek cheerfulness " ; while
of course we encounter the misunderstood notion
of this cheerfulness, as resulting from a state of
unendangered comfort, on all the ways and paths
of the present time.

The most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the
hapless (Edifus^ was understood by Sophocles as
the noble man, who in spite of his wisdom was
destined to error and misery, but nevertheless
through his extraordinary sufferings ultimately
exerted a magical, wholesome influence on all
around him, which continues effective even after
his death. The noble man does not sin ; this is
what the thoughtful poet wishes to tell us : all
laws, all natural order, yea, the moral world itself,
may be destroyed through his action, but through
this very action a higher magic circle of influences
is brought into play, which establish a new world
on the ruins of the old that has been overthrown.
This is what the poet, in so far as he is at the
same time a religious thinker, wishes to tell us:
as poet, he shows us first of all a wonderfully
complicated legal mystery, which the judge slowly
unravels, link by link, to his own destruction.

74 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

The truly Hellenic delight at this dialectical loosen
ing is so great, that a touch of surpassing cheer
fulness is thereby communicated to the entire
play, which everywhere blunts the edge of the
horrible presuppositions of the procedure. In the
"CEdipus at Colonus" we find the same cheerfulness,
elevated, however, to an infinite transfiguration : in
contrast to the aged king, subjected to an excess
of misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all
that befalls him, we have here a supermundane
cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere
and intimates to us that in his purely passive atti
tude the hero attains his highest activity, the influ
ence of which extends far beyond his life, while his
earlier conscious musing and striving led him only
to passivity. Thus, then, the legal knot of the fable
of CEdipus, which to mortal eyes appears indis-
solubly entangled, is slowly unravelled — and the
profoundest human joy comes upon us in the
presence of this divine counterpart of dialectics. If
this explanation does justice to the poet, it may
still be asked whether the substance of the myth
is thereby exhausted ; and here it turns out that
the entire conception of the poet is nothing but the
light-picture which healing nature holds up to us
after a glance into the abyss. CEdipus, the murderer
of his father, the husband of his mother, CEdipus,
the interpreter of the riddle of the Sphinx ! What
does the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny
tell us ? There is a primitive popular belief, especi
ally in Persia, that a wise Magian can be born only
of incest: which we have forthwith to interpret
to ourselves with reference to the riddle-solving

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 75

and mother-marrying CEdipus, to the effect that
when the boundary of the present and future, the
rigid law of individuation and, in general, the
intrinsic spell of nature, are broken by prophetic
and magical powers, an extraordinary counter-
naturalness — as, in this case, incest — must have
preceded as a cause ; for how else could one force
nature to surrender her secrets but by victoriously
opposing her, i.e., by means of the Unnatural ? It
is this intuition which I see imprinted in the awful
triad of the destiny of CEdipus : the very man who
solves the riddle of nature — that double-constituted
Sphinx — must also, as the murderer of his father
and husband of his mother, break the holiest laws
of nature. Indeed, it seems as if the myth sought
to whisper into our ears that wisdom, especially
Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination,
and that whoever, through his knowledge, plunges
nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also
experience the dissolution of nature in himself.
" The sharpness of wisdom turns round upon the
sage : wisdom is a crime against nature " : such
terrible expressions does the myth call out to us :
but the Hellenic poet touches like a sunbeam the
sublime and formidable Memnonian statue of the
myth, so that it suddenly begins to sound — in
Sophoclean melodies.

With the glory of passivity I now contrast
the glory of activity which illuminates the
Prometheus of yEschylus. That which /Eschylus
the thinker had to tell us here, but which as
a poet he only allows us to surmise by his
symbolic picture, the youthful Goethe succeeded

?6 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

in disclosing to us in the daring words of his
Prometheus : —

" Hier sitz' ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich ! " *

Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans,
acquires his culture by his own efforts, and com
pels the gods to unite with him, because in his
self-sufficient wisdom he has their existence and
their limits in his hand. What is most wonderful,
however, in this Promethean form, which accord
ing to its fundamental conception is the specific
hymn of impiety, is the profound ^Eschylean
yearning for justice-, the untold sorrow of the bold
" single-handed being " on the one hand, and the
divine need, ay, the foreboding of a twilight of the
gods, on the other, the power of these two worlds
of suffering constraining to reconciliation, to meta
physical oneness — all this suggests most forcibly
the central and main position of the yEschylean

* " Here sit I, forming mankind
In my image,
A race resembling me, —
To sorrow and to weep,
To taste, to hold, to enjoy,
And not have need of thee,
As I ! "

(Translation in Heeckel's History of the Evolution of Man.}

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 77

view of things, which sees Moira as eternal justice
enthroned above gods and men. In view of the
astonishing boldness with which ^Eschylus places
the Olympian world on his scales of justice, it
must be remembered that the deep-minded Greek
had an immovably firm substratum of meta
physical thought in his mysteries, and that all his
sceptical paroxysms could be discharged upon the
Olympians. With reference to these deities, the
Greek artist, in particular, had an obscure feeling
as to mutual dependency : and it is just in the
Prometheus of ^Eschylus that this feeling is sym
bolised. The Titanic artist found in himself the
daring belief that he could create men and at least
destroy Olympian deities : namely, by his superior
wisdom, for which, to be sure, he had to atone by
eternal suffering. The splendid "can-ing" of the
great genius, bought too cheaply even at the price
of eternal suffering, the stern pride of the artist :
this is the essence and soul of ^Eschylean poetry,
while Sophocles in his CEdipus preludingly strikes
up the victory-song of the saint. But even this
interpretation which yEschylus has given to the
myth does not fathom its astounding depth of
terror ; the fact is rather that the artist's delight
in unfolding, the cheerfulness of artistic creating
bidding defiance to all calamity, is but a shining
stellar and nebular image reflected in a black sea
of sadness. The tale of Prometheus is an original
possession of the entire Aryan family of races, and
documentary evidence of their capacity for the
profoundly tragic ; indeed, it is not improbable
that this myth has the same characteristic signifi-

78 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

cance for the Aryan race that the myth of the fall
of man has for the Semitic, and that there is a
relationship between the two myths like that of
brother and sister. The presupposition of the
Promethean myth is the transcendent value which
a naive humanity attach to fire as the true palla
dium of every ascending culture : that man, how
ever, should dispose at will of this fire, and should
not receive it only as a gift from heaven, as the
igniting lightning or the warming solar flame,
appeared to the contemplative primordial men as
crime and robbery of the divine nature. And thus
the first philosophical problem at once causes a
painful, irreconcilable antagonism between man
and God, and puts as it were a mass of rock at
the gate of every culture. The best and highest
that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and
must now in their turn take upon themselves its
consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings
and sorrows with which the offended celestials
must visit the nobly aspiring race of man : a bitter
reflection, which, by the dignity it confers on crime,
contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the
fall of man, in which curiosity, beguilement, sedu-
cibility, wantonness, — in short, a whole series of
pre-eminently feminine passions, — were regarded as
the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan
representation is the sublime view of active sin as
the properly Promethean virtue, which suggests at
the same time the ethical basis of pessimistic
tragedy as fat justification of human evil — of human
guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby.
The misery in the essence of things — which

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 79

the contemplative Aryan is not disposed to explain
away — the antagonism in the heart of the world,
manifests itself to him as a medley of different
worlds, for instance, a Divine and a human world,
each of which is in the right individually, but as
a separate existence alongside of another has to
suffer for its individuation. With the heroic effort
made by the individual for universality, in his
attempt to pass beyond the bounds of individuation
and become the one universal being, he experiences
in himself the primordial contradiction concealed in
the essence of things, i.e., he trespasses and suffers.
Accordingly crime* is understood by the Aryans to
be a man, sin f by the Semites a woman ; as also,
the original crime is committed by man, the original
sin by woman. Besides, the witches' chorus says :

" Wir nehmen das nicht so genau :
Mit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau ;
Doch wie sie auch sich eilen kann
Mit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann."J

He who understands this innermost core of the
tale of Prometheus — namely, the necessity of crime
imposed on the titanically striving individual — will
at once be conscious of the un-Apollonian nature
of this pessimistic representation : for Apollo seeks
to pacify individual beings precisely by drawing

* Der Frevel. t Die Suncle.

J We do not measure with such care :
Woman in thousand steps is there,
But howsoe'er she hasten may.
Man in one leap has cleared the way.

Faust, trans, of Bayard Taylor. — TR.

8O THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

boundary-lines between them, and by again and
again calling attention thereto, with his require
ments of self-knowledge and due proportion, as the
holiest laws of the universe. In order, however, to
prevent the form from congealing to Egyptian
rigidity and coldness in consequence of this
Apollonian tendency, in order to prevent the
extinction of the motion of the entire lake in the
effort to prescribe to the individual wave its path and
compass, the high tide of the Dionysian tendency
destroyed from time to time all the little circles in
which the one-sided Apollonian "will" sought to
confine the Hellenic world. The suddenly swelling
tide of the Dionysian then takes the separate little
wave-mountains of individuals on its back, just as
the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does
with the earth. This Titanic impulse, to become as
it were the Atlas of all individuals, and to carry them
on broad shoulders higher and higher, farther and
farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian
have in common. In this respect the yEschylean
Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in the afore
mentioned profound yearning for justice, ^schylus
betrays to the intelligent observer his paternal
descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and
of the boundaries of justice. And so the double-
being of the yEschylean Prometheus, his conjoint
Dionysian and Apollonian nature,might be thus ex
pressed in an abstract formula : " Whatever exists is
alike just and unjust, and equally justified in both."

Das ist deine Welt ! Das heisst eine Welt ! *

* This is thy world, and what a world! — Faust,

i

'< fv>'

W' / »

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 8l

10.

It is an indisputable tradition that Greek
tragedy in its earliest form had for its theme only
the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for some
time the only stage-hero therein was simply
Dionysus himself. With the same confidence,
however, we can maintain that not until Euripides
did Dionysus cease to be the tragic hero, and
that in fact all the celebrated figures of the Greek
stage — Prometheus, CEdipus, etc. — are but masks
of this original hero, Dionysus. The presence of
a god behind all these masks is the one essential
cause of the typical " ideality," so oft exciting
wonder, of these celebrated figures. Some one,
I know not whom, has maintained that all
individuals are comic as individuals and are
consequently un-tragic : from whence it might be
inferred that the Greeks in general could not
endure individuals on the tragic stage. And
they really seem to have had these sentiments :
as, in general, it is to be observed that the
Platonic discrimination and valuation of the
" idea" in contrast to the "eidolon," the image, is
deeply rooted in the Hellenic being. Availing
ourselves of Plato's terminology, however, we
should have to speak of the tragic figures of the
Hellenic stage somewhat as follows. The one
truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of
forms, in the mask of a fighting hero and entangled,
as it were, in the net of an individual will. As
the visibly appearing god now talks and acts,
he resembles an erring, striving, suffering in-
F

82 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

dividual : and that, in general, he appears with
such epic precision and clearness, is due to the
dream-reading Apollo, who reads to the chorus
its Dionysian state through this symbolic appear
ance. In reality, however, this hero is the
suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, a god
experiencing in himself the sufferings of individu-
ation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a
boy he was dismembered by the Titans and has
been worshipped in this state as Zagreus : * where
by is intimated that this dismemberment, the
properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transforma
tion into air, water, earth, and fire, that we must
therefore regard the state of individuation as the
source and primal cause of all suffering, as some
thing objectionable in itself. From the smile of
this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from
his tears sprang man. In his existence as a
dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature
of a cruel barbarised demon, and a mild pacific
ruler. But the hope of the epopts looked for a
new birth of Dionysus, which we have now to
conceive of in anticipation as the end of individua
tion : it was for this coming third Dionysus that
the stormy jubilation-hymns of the epopts re
sounded. And it is only this hope that sheds
a ray of joy upon the features of a world torn
asunder and shattered into individuals : as is
symbolised in the myth by Demeter sunk in
eternal sadness, who rejoices again only when told

* See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in The Academy, 3Otb
August 1902.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 83

that she may once more give birth to Dionysus
In the views of things here given we already have
all the elements of a profound and pessimistic
contemplation of the world, and along with these
we have the mystery doctrine of tragedy : the
fundamental knowledge of the oneness of all
existing things, the consideration of individuation
as the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous
hope that the spell of individuation may be
broken, as the augury of a restored oneness.

It has already been intimated that the Homeric
epos is the poem of Olympian culture, wherewith
this culture has sung its own song of triumph
over the terrors of the war of the Titans. Under
the predominating influence of tragic poetry, these
Homeric myths are now reproduced anew, and
show by this metempsychosis that meantime the
Olympian culture also has been vanquished by a
still deeper view of things. The haughty Titan Pro
metheus has announced to his Olympian tormentor
that the extremest danger will one day menace
his rule, unless he ally with him betimes. In
/Eschylus we perceive the terrified Zeus, appre
hensive of his end, in alliance with the Titan.
Thus, the former age of the Titans is subsequently
brought from Tartarus once more to the light ot
day. The philosophy of wild and naked nature
beholds with the undissembled mien of truth the
myths of the Homeric world as they dance past :
they turn pale, they tremble before the lightning
glance of this goddess — till the 'powerful fist * of

* Die miichtigc Faust. — Cf. Faust \ Chorus of Spirits.-- TR

84 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

the Dionysian artist forces them into the service
of the new deity. Dionysian truth takes over
the entire domain of myth as symbolism of its
knowledge, which it makes known partly in
the public cult of tragedy and partly in the
secret celebration of the dramatic mysteries,
always, however, in the old mythical garb. What
was the power, which freed Prometheus from his
vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle
of Dionysian wisdom ? It is the Heracleian
power of music : which, having reached its highest
manifestness in tragedy, can invest myths with a
new and most profound significance, which we
have already had occasion to characterise as the
most powerful faculty of music. For it is the
fate of every myth to insinuate itself into the
narrow limits of some alleged historical reality,
and to be treated by some later generation as
a solitary fact with historical claims : and the
Greeks were already fairly on the way to restamp
the whole of their mythical juvenile dream
sagaciously and arbitrarily into a historico-prag-
matical juvenile history. For this is the manner
in which religions are wont to die out : when of
course under the stern, intelligent eyes of an
orthodox dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions
of a religion are systematised as a completed sum
of historical events, and when one begins appre
hensively to defend the credibility of the myth,
while at the same time opposing all continuation
of their natural vitality and luxuriance ; when,
accordingly, the feeling for myth dies out, and its
place is taken by the claim of religion to historical

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 85

foundations. This dying myth was now seized
by the new-born genius of Dionysian music, in
whose hands it bloomed once more, with such
colours as it had never yet displayed, with
a fragrance that awakened a longing anticipa
tion of a metaphysical world. After this final
effulgence it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon
the scoffing Lucians of antiquity catch at the
discoloured and faded flowers which the winds
carry off in every direction. Through tragedy the
myth attains its profoundest significance, its most
expressive form ; it rises once more like a
wounded hero, and the whole surplus of vitality,
together with the philosophical calmness of the
Dying, burns in its eyes with a last powerful gleam.
What meantest thou, oh impious Euripides, in
seeking once more to enthral this dying one ? It
died under thy ruthless hands : and then thou
madest use of counterfeit, masked myth, which
like the ape of Heracles could only trick itself
out in the old finery. And as myth died in thy
hands, so also died the genius of music ; though
thou couldst covetously plunder all the gardens
of music — thou didst only realise a counterfeit,
masked music. And because thou hast forsaken
Dionysus, Apollo hath also forsaken thcc; rout up
all the passions from their haunts and conjure
them into thy sphere, sharpen and polish a
sophistical dialectics for the speeches of thy
heroes — thy very heroes have only counterfeit,
masked passions, and speak only counterfeit,
masked music.

86 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

I I.

Greek tragedy Mad a fate different from that
of all her older sister arts : she died by suicide,
in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict ;
accordingly she died tragically, while they all
passed away very calmly and beautifully in ripe old
age. For if it be in accordance with a happy state
of things to depart this life without a struggle,
leaving behind a fair posterity, the closing period
of these older arts exhibits such a happy state of
things : slowly they sink out of sight, and before
their dying eyes already stand their fairer pro
geny, who impatiently lift up their heads with
courageous mien. The death of Greek tragedy,
on the other hand, left an immense void, deeply
felt everywhere. Even as certain Greek sailors
in the time of Tiberius once heard upon a lone
some island the thrilling cry, " great Pan is
dead " : so now as it were sorrowful wailing
sounded through the Hellenic world : " Tragedy
is dead ! Poetry itself has perished with her !
Begone, begone, ye stunted, emaciated epigones !
Begone to Hades, that ye may for once eat your
fill of the crumbs of your former masters ! "

But when after all a new Art blossomed forth
which revered tragedy as her ancestress and
mistress, it was observed with horror that she did
indeed bear the features of her mother, but those
very features the latter had exhibited in her long
death-struggle. It was Euripides who fought this
death-struggle of tragedy ; the later art is known
as the New Attic Comedy. In it the degenerate

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 87

form of tragedy lived, on as a monument of the
most painful and. violent death of tragedy proper.

This connection between the two serves to
explain the passionate attachment to Euripides
evinced by the poets of the New Comedy, and
hence we are no longer surprised at the wish of
Philemon, who would have got himself hanged at
once, with the sole design of being able to visit
Euripides in the lower regions : if only he could
be assured generally that the deceased still had
his wits. But if we desire, as briefly as possible,
and without professing to say aught exhaustive on
the subject, to characterise what Euripides has in
common with Menander and Philemon, and what
appealed to them so strongly as worthy of imita
tion : it will suffice to say that the spectator
was brought upon the stage by Kuripides. He
who has perceived the material of which the
Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides
formed their heroes, and how remote from their
purpose it was to bring the true mask of
reality on the stage, will also know what to make
of the wholly divergent tendency of Euripides.
Through him the commonplace individual forced
his way from the spectators' benches to the stage
itself; the mirror in which formerly only great
and bold traits found expression now showed the
painful exactness that conscientiously reproduces
even the abortive lines of nature. Odysseus, the
typical Hellene of the Old Art, sank, in the hands
of the new poets, to the figure of the Gra_*culus,
who, as the good-naturedly cunning domestic
slave, stands henceforth in the centre of dramatic

88 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

interest. What Euripides takes credit for in the
Aristophanean " Frogs," namely, that by his
household remedies he freed tragic art from its
pompous corpulency, is apparent above all in his
tragic heroes. The spectator now virtually saw
and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and
rejoiced that he could talk so well. But this joy
was not all : one even learned of Euripides how
to speak : he prides himself upon this in his
contest with ./Eschylus : how the people have
learned from him how to observe, debate, and
draw conclusions according to the rules of art and
with the cleverest sophistications. In general it
may be said that through this revolution of the
popular language he made the New Comedy
possible. For it was henceforth no longer a
secret, how — and with what saws — the common
place could represent and express itself on the
stage. Civic mediocrity, on which Euripides
built all his political hopes, was now suffered to
speak, while heretofore the demigod in tragedy
and the drunken satyr, or demiman, in comedy,
had determined the character of the language.
And so the Aristophanean Euripides prides him
self on having portrayed the common, familiar,
everyday life and dealings of the people, concern
ing which all are qualified to pass judgment. If
now the entire populace philosophises, manages
land and goods with unheard-of circumspection,
and conducts law-suits, he takes all the credit to
himself, and glories in the splendid results of the
wisdom with which he inoculated the rabble.
It was to a populace prepared and enlightened

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 89

in this manner that the New Comedy could now
address itself, of which Euripides had become as
it were the chorus-master ; only that in this case
the chorus of spectators had to be trained. As
soon as this chorus was trained to sing in the
Euripidean key, there arose that chesslike variety
of the drama, the New Comedy, with its perpetual
triumphs of cunning and artfulness. But Eurip
ides — the chorus-master — was praised inces
santly : indeed, people would have killed them
selves in order to learn yet more from him, had
they not known that tragic poets were quite as
dead as tragedy. But with it the Hellene had
surrendered the belief in his immortality ; not only
the belief in, an ideal past, but also the belief in an
ideal future. The saying taken from the well-
known epitaph, " as an old man, frivolous and
capricious," applies also to aged Hellenism. The
passing moment, wit, levity, and caprice, are its
highest deities ; the fifth class, that of the slaves,
now attains to power, at least in sentiment : and if
we can still speak at all of " Greek cheerfulness," it
is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of
consequence to answer for, nothing great to strive
for, and cannot value anything of the past or future
higher than the present. It was this semblance of
" Greek cheerfulness " which so revolted the deep-
minded and formidable natures of the first four
centuries of Christianity : this womanish flight
from earnestness and terror, this cowardly con-
tentedness with easy pleasure, was not only con
temptible to them, but seemed to be a specifically
anti-Christian sentiment. And we must ascribe

90 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

it to its influence that the conception of Greek
antiquity, which lived on for centuries, preserved
with almost enduring persistency that peculiar
hectic colour of cheerfulness — as if there had never
been a Sixth Century with its birth of tragedy, its
Mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed
as if the art-works of that great period did not at
all exist, which in fact — each by itself — can in no
wise be explained as having sprung from the soil
of such a decrepit and slavish love of existence
and cheerfulness, and point to an altogether differ
ent conception of things as their source.

The assertion made a moment ago, that Eurip
ides introduced the spectator on the stage to
qualify him the better to pass judgment on the
drama, will make it appear as if the old tragic art
was always in a false relation to the spectator:
and one would be tempted to extol the radical
tendency of Euripides to bring about an adequate
relation between art-work and public as an advance
on Sophocles. But, as things are, " public " is
merely a word, and not at all a homogeneous and
constant quantity. Why should the artist be under
obligations to accommodate himself to a power
whose strength is merely in numbers ? And if by
virtue of his endowments and aspirations he feels
himself superior to every one of these spectators,
how could he feel greater respect for the collect
ive expression of all these subordinate capacities
than for the relatively highest-endowed individual
spectator ? In truth, if ever a Greek artist treated
his public throughout a long life with presumptuous-
ness and self-sufficiency, it was Euripides, who,

THE BIRTH OK TRAGEDY. 91

even when the masses threw themselves at his feet,
with sublime defiance made an open assault on his
own tendency, the very tendency with which he
had triumphed over the masses. If this genius
had had the slightest reverence for the pande
monium of the public, he would have broken down
long before the middle of his career beneath the
weighty blows of his own failures. These con
siderations here make it obvious that our formula
— namely, that Euripides brought the spectator
upon the stage in order to make him truly com
petent to pass judgment — was but a provisional
one, and that we must seek for a deeper under
standing of his tendency. Conversely, it is un
doubtedly well known thatyEschylus and Sophocles
during all their lives, indeed, far beyond their
lives, enjoyed the full favour of the people, and
that therefore in the case of these predecessors of
Euripides the idea of a false relation between art
work and public was altogether excluded. What
was it that thus forcibly diverted this highly gifted
artist, so incessantly impelled to production, from
the path over which shone the sun of the greatest
names in poetry and the cloudless heaven of
popular favour ? What strange consideration for
the spectator led him to defy the spectator ? How
could he, owing to too much respect for the public
— dis-respect the public ?

Euripides — and this is the solution of the riddle
just propounded — felt himself, as a poet, un
doubtedly superior to the masses, but not to two
of his spectators : he brought the masses upon
the stage ; these two spectators he revered as the

92 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

only competent judges and masters of his art : in
compliance with their directions and admonitions,
he transferred the entire world of sentiments,
passions, and experiences, hitherto present at every
festival representation as the invisible chorus on
the spectators' benches, into the souls of his stage-
heroes ; he yielded to their demands when he also
sought for these new characters the new word and
the new tone ; in their voices alone he heard the
conclusive verdict on his work, as also the cheering
promise of triumph when he found himself con
demned as usual by the justice of the public.

Of these two spectators the one is — Euripides
himself, Euripides as thinker ; not as poet. It
might be said of him, that his unusually large fund
of critical ability, as in the case of Lessing, if it did
not create, at least constantly fructified a product
ively artistic collateral impulse. With this faculty,
with all the clearness and dexterity of his critical
thought, Euripides had sat in the theatre and
striven to recognise in the masterpieces of his great
predecessors, as in faded paintings, feature and
feature, line and line. And here had happened to
him what one initiated in the deeper arcana of
^Eschylean tragedy must needs have expected :
he observed something incommensurable in every
feature and in every line, a certain deceptive dis
tinctness and at the same time an enigmatic pro
fundity, yea an infinitude, of background. Even
the clearest figure had always a comet's tail attached
to it, which seemed to suggest the uncertain and
the inexplicable. The same twilight shrouded the
structure of the drama, especially the significance

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 93

of the chorus. And how doubtful seemed the
solution of the ethical problems to his mind !
How questionable the treatment of the myths !
How unequal the distribution of happiness and
misfortune ! Even in the language of the Old
Tragedy there was much that was objectionable to
him, or at least enigmatical ; he found especially
too much pomp for simple affairs, too many tropes
and immense things for the plainness of the
characters. Thus he sat restlessly pondering in
the theatre, and as a spectator he acknowledged
to himself that he did not understand his great
predecessors. If, however, he thought the under
standing the root proper of all enjoyment and
productivity, he had to inquire and look about to
see whether any one else thought as he did, and
also acknowledged this incommensurability. But
most people, and among them the best individuals,
had only a distrustful smile for him, while none
could explain why the great masters were still in
the right in face of his scruples and objections.
And in this painful condition he found that other
spectator, who did not comprehend, and therefore
did not esteem, tragedy. In alliance with him he
could venture, from amid his lonesomeness, to begin
the prodigious struggle against the art of /Kschylus
and Sophocles — not with polemic writings, but as
a dramatic poet, who opposed his own conception
of tragedy to the traditional one.

94 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

12.

Before we name this other spectator, let us
pause here a moment in order to recall our own
impression, as previously described, of the dis
cordant and incommensurable elements in the
nature of yEschylean tragedy. Let us think of
our own astonishment at the chorus and the tragic
hero of that type of tragedy, neither of which
we could reconcile with our practices any more
than with tradition — till we rediscovered this
duplexity itself as the origin and essence of Greek
tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic
impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

To separate this primitive and all-powerful
Dionysian element from tragedy, and to build up
a new and purified form of tragedy on the basis
of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception
of things — such is the tendency of Euripides
which now reveals itself to us in a clear light.

In a myth composed in the eve of his life,
Euripides himself most urgently propounded to
his contemporaries the question as to the value
and signification of this tendency. Is the
Dionysian entitled to exist at all ? Should it not
be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic soil ?
Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible :
but the god Dionysus is too powerful ; his most
intelligent adversary — like Pentheus in the
" Bacchse " — is unwittingly enchanted by him,
and in this enchantment meets his fate. The
judgment of the two old sages, Cadmus and
Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of the

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 95

aged poet : that the reflection of the wisest indi
viduals does not overthrow old popular traditions,
nor the perpetually propagating worship ot
Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display
at least a diplomatically cautious concern in the
presence of such strange forces : where however it
is always possible that the god may take offence
at such lukewarm participation, and finally change
the diplomat — in this case Cadmus — into a
dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who opposed
Dionysus with heroic valour throughout a long
life — in order finally to wind up his career with
a glorification of his adversary, and with suicide,
like one staggering from giddiness, who, in order
to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer
endure, casts himself from a tower. This tragedy
—the Bacchae — is a protest against the practic
ability of his own tendency ; alas, and it has already
been put into practice ! The surprising thing had
happened : when the poet recanted, his tendency
had already conquered. Dionysus had already
been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by
a demonic power which spoke through Euripides.
Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a
mask : the deity that spoke through him was
neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether
new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the
nrw antilliLii : the Dionysian and the >"iMt:<
and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked
on it._ What if even Euripides now seeks to
comfort us by his recantation ? It is of no avail :
the most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What
avails the lamentation of the destroyer, and his

96 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

confession that it was the most beautiful of all
temples ? • And even that Euripides has been
changed into a dragon as a punishment by the
art-critics of all ages — who could be content with
this wretched compensation ?

Let us now approach this Socratic tendency
with which Euripides combated and vanquished
^Eschylean tragedy.

We must now ask ourselves, what could be
the ulterior aim of the Euripidean design, which,
in the highest ideality of its execution, would
found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian ?
What other form of drama could there be, if it
was not to be born of the womb of music, in the
mysterious twilight of the Dionysian ? Only the
dramatised epos : in which Apollonian domain of
art the tragic effect is of course unattainable. It
does not depend on the subject-matter of the
events here represented ; indeed, I venture to assert
that it would have been impossible for Goethe
in his projected " Nausikaa " to have rendered
tragically effective the suicide of the idyllic being
with which he intended to complete the fifth act ;
so extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apol
lonian representation, that it charms, before our
eyes, the most terrible things by the joy in
appearance and in redemption through appearance.
The poet of the dramatised epos cannot completely
blend with his pictures any more than the epic
rhapsodist He is still just the calm, unmoved em
bodiment of Contemplation whose wide eyes see the
picture before them. The actor in this dramatised
epos still remains intrinsically rhapsodist : the con-

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 97

secration of inner dreaming is on all his actions,
so that he is never wholly an actor.

How, then, is the Euripidean play related to
this ideal of the Apollonian drama? Just as the
younger rhapsodist is related to the solemn
rhapsodist of the old time. The former describes
his own character in the Platonic " Ion " as
follows: "When I am saying anything sad, my
eyes fill with tears ; when, however, what I am
saying is awful and terrible, then my hair stands
on end through fear, and my heart leaps." Here
we no longer observe anything of the epic absorp
tion in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness
of the true actor, who precisely in his highest
activity is wholly appearance and joy in appear
ance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart,
with hair standing on end ; as Socratic thinker
he designs .the plan, as passionate actor he
executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the
execution is he an artist pure and simple. And
so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and
fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning ; it is
impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of
the epos,while,on the other hand.it has severed itself
as much as possible from Dionysian elements, and
now, in order to act at all, it requires new stimu
lants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of
the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and
the Dionysian. The stimulants are cool, para
doxical t/wug/iti,

and fiery passion*-^ in. place of Dioaysiaa
and in fact, thoughts and passions very realistically
copied, and not at all steeped in the ether of art.
G

98 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that
Euripides did not succeed in establishing the drama
exclusively on the Apollonian, but that rather his
non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a natural
istic and inartistic tendency, we shall now be able
to approach nearer to the character of

*Jh.t supreme law of which reads about
as follows : " to be beautiful everything must be
intelligible," as the parallel to the Socratic proposi
tion, " only the knowing jojieaoktRoy5-" With this
canon in his hands Euripides measured all the
separate elements of the drama, and rectified them
according to his principle : the language, the char
acters, the dramaturgic structure, and the choric
music. The poetic deficiency and retrogression,
which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides
in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, is for the
most part the product of this penetrating critical
process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidean
prologue may serve us as an example of the pro
ductivity of this rationalistic method. Nothing
could be more opposed to the technique of our stage
than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For
a single person to appear at the outset of the play
telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what
has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the
course of the play, would be designated by a modern
playwright as a wanton and unpardonable abandon
ment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is
about to happen is known beforehand ; who then
cares to wait for it actually to happen ? — consider
ing, moreover, that here there is not by any means the
exciting relation of a predicting dream to a reality

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 99

taking place later on. Euripides speculated quite
differently. The effect of tragedy never depended
on epic suspense, on the fascinating uncertainty as
to what is to happen now and afterwards : but
rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which
the passion and dialectics of the chief hero swelled
to a broad and mighty stream. Everything was
arranged for pathos, not for action : and whatever
was not arranged for pathos was regarded as
objectionable. But what interferes most with the
hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a
missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous
history. So long as the spectator has to divine the
meaning of this or that person, or the presupposi
tions of this or that conflict of inclinations and
intentions, his complete absorption in the doings
and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible,
as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellow-
fearing. The /Eschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy em
ployed the most ingenious devices in the first scenes
to place in the hands of the spectator as if by
chance all the threads requisite for understanding
the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is
approved, which as it were masks the inevitably
formal, and causes it to appear as something acci
dental. But nevertheless Euripides thought he
observed that during these first scenes the spectator
was in a strange state of anxiety to make out the
problem of the previous history, so that the poetic
beauties and pathos of the exposition were lost to
him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even
before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a
person who could be trusted : some deity had often

100 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

as it were to guarantee the particulars of the
tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as
to the reality of the myth : as in the case of
Descartes, who could only prove the reality of the
empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of
God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides
makes use of the same divine truthfulness once
more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure
to the public the future of his heroes ; this is the
task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between
the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle
there is the dramatico-lyric present, the " drama "
proper.

Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his
own conscious knowledge ; and it is precisely on
this account that he occupies such a notable position
in the history of Greek art. With reference to his
critico-productive activity, he must often have felt
that he ought to actualise in the drama the words
at the beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras : "Jjn
the beginning all things were mixed together ; then
came the understanding and created order." And
if Anaxagoras with his " v oO? ** seemed like the first
sober person among nothing but drunken philoso
phers, Euripides may also have conceived his rela
tion to the other tragic poets under a similar figure.
As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe,
the vovs, was still excluded from artistic activity,
things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primi
tive mess; — it is thus Euripides was obliged to think,
it is thus he was obliged to condemn the " drunken "
poets as the first " sober " one among them. What
Sophocles said of ^Eschylus, that he did what was

THK BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. IOI

right, though unconsciously, was surely not in the:
mind of Euripides : who would have admitted only
thus much, that ^schylus, because he wrought
unconsciously, did what was wrong. So also the
divine Plato speaks for the most part only ironically
of the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is
not conscious insight, and places it on a par with
the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter ;
insinuating that the poet is incapable of composing
until he has become unconscious and reason has
deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to
show to the world the reverse of the " unintelligent "
poet ; his aesthetic principle that " to be beautiful
everything must be known " is, as I have said, the
parallel to the Socratic " to be good everything must
be known." Accordingly we may regard Euripides
as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates, how-
cver, was that second spectator who did not compre
hend and therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy;
in alliance with him Euripides ventured to be the
herald of a new artistic activity. If, then, the Old
Tragedy was here destroyed, it follows that aesthetic
Socratism was the murderous principle ; but in so
far as the struggle is directed against the Dionysian
element in the old art, we recognise in Socrates the
opponent of Dionysus, the new Orpheus who rebels
against Dionysus ; and although destined to be
torn to pieces by the Maenads of the Athenian
court, yet puts to flight the overpowerful god him
self, who, when he fled from Lycurgus, the king
of Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the ocean
—namely, in the mystical flood of a secret cult
which gradually overspread the earth.

102 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

That Socrates stood in close relationship to
Euripides in the tendency of his teaching, did
not escape the notice of contemporaneous
antiquity ; the most eloquent expression of this
felicitous insight being the tale current in Athens,
that Socrates was accustomed to help Euripides
in poetising. Both names were mentioned in one
breath by the adherents of the " good old time,"
whenever they came to enumerating the popular
agitators of the day : to whose influence they
attributed the fact that the old Marathonian
stalwart capacity of body and soul was more and
more being sacrificed to a dubious enlightenment,
involving progressive degeneration of the physical
and mental powers. It is in this tone, half
indignantly and half contemptuously, that Aristo-
phanic comedy is wont to speak of both of
them — to the consternation of modern men, who
would indeed be willing enough to give up
Euripides, but cannot suppress their amazement
that Socrates should appear in Aristophanes as
the first and head sophist, as the mirror and
epitome of all sophistical tendencies ; in connec
tion with which it offers the single consolation of
putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory, as a
rakish, lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here
defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes
against such attacks, I shall now indicate, by
means of the sentiments of the time, the close
connection between Socrates and Euripides.
With this purpose in view, it is especially to be

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 103

remembered that Socrates, as an opponent of
tragic art, did not ordinarily patronise tragedy, but
only appeared among the spectators when a new
play of Euripides was performed. The most
noted thing, however, is the close juxtaposition
of the two names in the Delphic oracle, which
designated Socrates as the wisest of men, but at
the same time decided that the second prize in
the contest of wisdom was due to Euripides.

Sophocles was designated as the third in this
scale of rank ; he who could pride himself that,
in comparison with yEschylus, he did what was
right, and did it, moreover, because he knew what
was right. It is evidently just the degree of
clearness of this knowledge^ which distinguishes
these three men in common as the three " knowing
ones " of their age.

The most decisive word, however, for this
new and unprecedented esteem of knowledge and
insight was spoken by Socrates when he found
that he was the only one who acknowledged to
himself that he knew nothing; while in his critical
pilgrimage through Athens, and calling on the
greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he
discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge.
He perceived, to his astonishment, that all these
celebrities were without a proper and accurate
insight, even with regard to their own callings,
and practised them only by instinct. " Only bv
.j'netinrt " : with this phrase we touch upon the
heart &nd core of the Soccatic tendency. Socrat-
ism condemns- therewith -existing art as wdl as
existing ethics ; wherever Socratism turns its

104 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and
the power of illusion ; and from this lack infers
the inner perversity and objection ableness of
existing conditions. From this point onwards,
Socrates believed that he was called upon to,
correct existence ; and, with an air of disregard
and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether
different culture, art, and morality, he enters
single-handed into a world, of which, if we
reverently touched the hem, we should count it
our greatest happiness.

Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which
always seizes upon us with regard to Socrates,
and again and again invites us to ascertain
the sense and purpose of this most question
able phenomenon of antiquity. Who is it that
ventures single-handed to disown the Greek char
acter, which, as Homer, Pindar, and ^Eschylus,
as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus,
as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is
sure of our wondering admiration ? What de
moniac power is it which would presume to spill
this magic draught in the dust ? What demigod
is it to whom the chorus of spirits of the noblest
of mankind must call out : " Weh ! Weh ! Du
hast sie zerstort, die schone Welt, mit machtiger
Faust ; sie stiirzt, sie zerfallt ! " *

*Woe! Woe !
Thou hast it destroyed,
The beautiful world ;
With powerful fist ;
In ruin 'tis hurled !
Faust) trans, of Bayard Taylor. — TR.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 105

A key to the character of Socrates is presented
to us by the surprising phenomenon designated
as the " daimonion " of Socrates. In special
circumstances, when his gigantic intellect began
to stagger, he got a secure support in the utter
ances of a divine voice which then spake to him.
This voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades.
In this totally abnormal nature instinctive wisdom
only appears in order to hinder the progress of
conscious perception here and there. While in
all productive men it is instinct which is the
creatively affirmative force, consciousness only
comporting itself critically and dissuasively ; with
Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic, it is
consciousness which becomes creator — a perfect
monstrosity per defectum ! And we do indeed
observe here a monstrous defectus of all mystical
aptitude, so that Socrates might be designated as
the specific non-mystic> in whom the logical nature
is developed, through a superfoetation, to the
same excess as instinctive wisdom is developed
in the mystic. On the other hand, however, the
logical instinct which appeared in Socrates was
absolutely prohibited from turning against itself ;
in its unchecked flow it manifests a native power
such as we meet with, to our shocking surprise,
only among the very greatest instinctive forces.
He who has experienced even a breath of the
divine naivete* and security of the Socratic course
of life in the Platonic writings, will also feel that
the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism
is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that
it must be viewed through Socrates as through a

IC>6 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

shadow. And that he himself had a boding of
this relation is apparent from the dignified earnest
ness with which he everywhere, and even before
his judges, insisted on his divine calling. To
refute him here was really as impossible as to
approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence.
In view of this indissoluble conflict, when he had
at last been brought before the forum of the Greek
state, there was only one punishment demanded,
namely exile ; he might have been sped across
the borders as something thoroughly enigmatical,
irrubricable and inexplicable, and so posterity would
have been quite unjustified in charging the Athenians
with a deed of ignominy. But that the sentence of
death, and not mere exile, was pronounced upon
him, seems to have been brought about by Socrates
himself, with perfect knowledge of the circum
stances, and without the natural fear of death : he
met his death with the calmness with which,
according to the description of Plato, he leaves
the symposium at break of day, as the last of the
revellers, to begin a new day ; while the sleepy
companions remain behind on the benches and
the floor, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist.
The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the
noble Greek youths, — an ideal they had never
yet beheld, — and above all, the typical Hellenic
youth, Plato, prostrated himself before this scene
with all the fervent devotion of his visionary
soul

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 107

Let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean
eye of Socrates fixed on tragedy, that eye in which
the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never
glowed — let us think how it was denied to this
eye to gaze with pleasure into the Dionysian
abysses — what could it not but see in the " sublime
and greatly lauded " tragic art, as Plato called it ?
Something very absurd, with causes that seemed
to be without effects, and effects apparently with
out causes ; the whole, moreover, so motley and
diversified that it could not but be repugnant to a
thoughtful mind, a dangerous incentive, however,
to sensitive and irritable souls. We know what
was the sole kind of poetry which he compre
hended : the JEsopian fable : and he did this no
doubt \vith that smiling complaisance with which
the good honest Gellert sings the praise of poetry
in the fable of the bee and the hen : —

" Du siehst an mir, wozu sie niitzt,
Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt,
Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen." ^

But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did
not even " tell the truth " : not to mention the
fact that it addresses itself to him who " hath but
little wit " ; consequently not to the philosopher :
a twofold reason why it should be avoided. Like

* In me thou seest its benefit, —
To him who hath but little wit,
Through parables to tell the truth.

108 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

Plato, he reckoned it among the seductive arts
which only represent the agreeable, not the useful,
and hence he required of his disciples abstinence
and strict separation from such unphilosophical
allurements ; with such success that the youthful
tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems to
be able to become a scholar of Socrates. But
where unconquerable native capacities bore up
against the Socratic maxims, their power, to
gether with the momentum of his mighty character,
still sufficed to force poetry itself into new and
hitherto unknown channels.

An instance of this is the aforesaid Plato : he,
who in the condemnation of tragedy and of art
in general certainly did not fall short of the nai've
cynicism of his master, was nevertheless constrained
by sheer artistic necessity to create a form of art
which is inwardly related even to the then exist
ing forms of art which he repudiated. Plato's
main objection to the old art — that it is the
imitation of a phantom,* and hence belongs to
a sphere still lower than the empiric world — could
not at all apply to the new art : and so we find
Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and
attempting to represent the idea which underlies
this pseudo-reality. But Plato, the thinker,
thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at
the point where he had always been at home as
poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old
artists had solemnly protested against that objec
tion. If tragedy absorbed into itself all the

.— TR.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. IOO,

earlier varieties of art, the same could again be
said in an unusual sense of Platonic dialogue,
which, engendered by a mixture of all the
then existing forms and styles, hovers midway
between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose
and poetry, and has also thereby broken loose
from the older strict law of unity of linguistic
form ; a movement which was carried still farther
by the cynic writers, who in the most promiscuous
style, oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and
metrical forms, realised also the literary picture
of the " raving Socrates " whom they were wont
to represent in life. Platonic, diajggufi was as. it
were the boat in which the shipwrecked ancient
poetry saved herself together with all her children :
crowded into a narrow space and timidly obse
quious to the one steersman, Socrates, they now
launched into a new world, which never tired of
looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession.
In very truth, Pjato has given to all posterity
the prototype of a new form of art, the prototype
of the navel: which must be designated as the
infinitely evolved .L^upiaii fable, in which poetry
holds the same rank with reference to dialectic
philosophy as this same philosophy held for many
centuries with reference to theology : namely, the
rank of ancilla. This was the new position of
poetry into which Plato forced it under the
pressure of the demon-inspired Socrates.

Here philosophic thought overgrows art and
compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectics.
The Apollonian tendency has chrysalised in the
logical schematism ; just as something analogous

IIO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

in the case of Euripides (and moreover a trans
lation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic
emotion) was forced upon our attention. Socrates,
the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us
of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who
has to defend his actions by arguments and
counter- arguments, and thereby so often runs the
risk of forfeiting our tragic pity ; for who could
mistake the optimistic element in the essence of
dialectics, which celebrates a jubilee in every con
clusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness
and consciousness : the optimistic element, which,
having once forced its way into tragedy, must
gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions, and
necessarily impel it to self-destruction — even to
the death-leap into the bourgeois drama. Let us
but realise the consequences of the Socratic
maxims : " Virtue is knowledge ; man only sins
from ignorance ; he who is virtuous is happy " :
these three fundamental forms of optimism involve
the death of tragedy. For the virtuous .hero
must now be a dialectician ; there must now be
a necessary, visible connection between virtue and
knowledge, between belief and morality ; the
transcendental justice of the plot in ^Eschylus is
now degraded to the superficial and audacious
principle of " poetic justice " with its usual deus ex
machina.

How does the chorus, and, in general, the
entire Dionyso-musical substratum of tragedy,
now appear in the light of this new Socrato-
optimistic stage-world ? As something accidental,
as a readily dispensable reminiscence of the origin

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. Ill

of tragedy ; while we have in fact seen that the
chorus can be understood only as the cause of
tragedy, and of the tragic generally. This per
plexity with respect to the chorus first manifests
itself in Sophocles — an important sign that the
Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to
disintegrate with him. He no longer ventures
to entrust to the chorus the main share of the
effect, but limits its sphere to such an extent
that it now appears almost co-ordinate with the
actors, just as if it were elevated from the orchestra
into the scene: whereby of course its. character
is completely destroyed, notwithstanding that
Aristotle countenances this very theory of the
chorus. This alteration of the position of the
chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended
by his practice, and, according to tradition, even
by a treatise, is the first step towards the annihila
tion of the chorus, the phases of which follow one
another with alarming rapidity in Euripides,
Agathon, and the New Comedy. Optimistic
dialectics drives music out of tragedy with the
scourge of its syllogisms : that is, it destroys the
essence of tragedy, which can be explained only
as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian
states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as
the dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy.

If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Diony-
sian tendency operating even before Socrates,
which received in him only an unprecedentedly
grand expression, we must not shrink from the
question as to what a phenomenon like that
of Socrates indicates : whom in view of the

112 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

Platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled
to regard as a purely disintegrating, negative
power. And though there can be no doubt
whatever that the most immediate effect of the
Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of
Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of
Socrates' own life compels us to ask whether
there is necessarily only an antipodal relation
between Socratism and art, and whether the birth
of an " artistic Socrates " is in general something
contradictory in itself.

For that despotic logician had now and then
the feeling of a gap, or void, a sentiment of semi-
reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty with
respect to art. There often came to him, as he
tells his friends in prison, one and the same
dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating
to him : " Socrates, practise music." Up to his
very last days he solaces himself with the opinion
that his philosophising is the highest form of
poetry, and finds it hard to believe that a deity
will remind him of the " common, popular music."
Finally, when in prison, he consents to practise
also this despised music, in order thoroughly to
unburden his conscience. And in this frame of
mind he composes a poem on Apollo and turns
a few jEsopian fables into verse. It was some
thing similar to the demonian warning voice which
urged him to these practices ; it was because of his
Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric king, he
did not understand the noble image of a god and
was in danger of sinning against a deity — through
ignorance. The prompting voice of the Socratic

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 113

dream-vision is the only sign of doubtfulness as
to the limits of logical nature. " Perhaps " — thus
he had to ask himself — " what is not intelligible
to me is not therefore unreasonable? Perhaps
there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician
is banished ? Perhaps art is even a necessary
correlative of and supplement to science ? "

In the sense of these last portentous questions
it must now be indicated how the influence of
Socrates (extending to the present moment, indeed,
to all futurity) has spread over posterity like an
ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun, and
how this influence again and again necessitates a
regeneration at art, — yea, of art already with meta
physical, broadest and profoundest sense, — and
its own eternity guarantees also the eternity of art.

Before this could be perceived, before the in
trinsic dependence of every art on the Greeks,
the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was con
clusively demonstrated, it had to happen to us
with regard to these Greeks as it happened to
the Athenians with regard to Socrates. Nearly
every age and stage of culture has at some time
or other sought with deep displeasure to free
itself from the Greeks, because in their presence
everything self-achieved, sincerely admired and
apparently quite original, seemed all of a sudden
to lose life and colour and shrink to an abortive
copy, even to caricature. And so hearty in
dignation breaks forth time after time against
H

114 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

this presumptuous little nation, which dared to
designate as " barbaric " for all time everything
not native : who are they, one asks one's self,
who, though they possessed only an ephemeral
historical splendour, ridiculously restricted institu
tions, a dubious excellence in their customs, and
were even branded with ugly vices, yet lay claim
to the dignity and singular position among the
peoples to which genius is entitled among the
masses. What a pity one has not been so fortunate
as to find the cup of hemlock with which such an
affair could be disposed of without ado : for
all the poison which envy, calumny, and rankling
resentment engendered within themselves have
not sufficed to destroy that self-sufficient grandeur !
And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the
presence of the Greeks : unless one prize truth
above all things, and dare also to acknowledge to
one's self this truth, that the Greeks, as charioteers,
hold in their hands the reins of our own and of
every culture, but that almost always chariot and
horses are of too poor material and incom
mensurate with the glory of their guides, who
then will deem it sport to run such a team into
an abyss : which they themselves clear with the
leap of Achilles.

In order to assign also to Socrates the dignity
of such a leading position, it will suffice to recog
nise in him the type of an unheard-of form of
existence, the type of the theoretical^ man, with
regard to whose meaning and purpose it will be
our next task to attain an insight. Lake. the. artist,
the theorist also finds an infinite satisfaction in

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 115

what is, and, like the former, he is shielded by this
satisfaction from the practical ethics of pessimism
with its lynx eyes which shine only in the dark.
For if the artist in every unveiling of truth always
cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which still
remains veiled after the unveiling, the theoretical
man, on the other hand, enjoys and contents
himself with the cast-off veil, and finds the con
summation of his pleasure in the process of a
continuously successful unveiling through his
own unaided efforts. There would have been no
science if it had only been concerned about that
one naked goddess and nothing else. For then
its disciples would have been obliged to feel like
those who purposed to dig a hole straight through
the earth : each one of whom perceives that with
the utmost lifelong exertion he is able to excavate
only a very little of the enormous depth, which is
again filled up before his eyes by the labours of
his successor, so that a third man seems to do
well when on his own account he selects a new
spot for his attempts at tunnelling. If now some
one proves conclusively that the antipodal goal
cannot be attained in this direct way, who will
still care to toil on in the old depths, unless he
has learned to content himself in the meantime
with finding precious stones or discovering natural
laws ? For that reason Lessing, the most honest
theoretical man, ventured to say that he cared
more for the search after truth than for truth
itself: in saying which he revealed the funda
mental secret of science, to the astonishment, and
indeed, to the vexation of scientific men. Well,

Il6 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

to be sure, there stands alongside of this detached
perception, as an excess of honesty, if not of
presumption, a profound illusion which first came
to the world in the person of Socrates, the im
perturbable belief that, by means of the clue of
causality, thinking reaches to the deepest abysses
of being, and that thinking is able not only to
perceive being but even to correct it. This sublime
metaphysical illusion is added as an instinct to
science and again and again leads the latter to
its limits, where it must change into art ; which is
really the end to be attained by this mechanism.

If we now look at Socrates in the light of this
thought, he appears to us as the first who could
not only live, but — what is far more — also die
under the guidance of this instinct of science:
and hence the picture of the dying Socrates, as
the man delivered from the fear of death by
knowledge and argument, is the escutcheon above
the entrance to science which reminds every one
of its mission, namely, to make existence appear
to be comprehensible, and therefore to be justified :
for which purpose, if arguments do.. not ._ suffice,
myth also must be used, which I just now desig
nated even as the necessary consequence, yea,
as the end of science.

He who once makes intelligible to himself how,
after the death of Socrates, the mystagogue of
science, one philosophical school succeeds another,
like wave upon wave, — how an entirely unfore-
shadowed universal development of the thirst for
knowledge in the widest compass of the cultured
world (and as the specific task for every one

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 117

highly gifted) led science on to the high sea from
which since then it has never again been able to
be completely ousted ; how through the universality
of this movement a common net of thought was
first stretched over the entire globe, with prospects,
moreover, of conformity to law in an entire solar
system ; — he who realises all this, together with
the amazingly high pyramid of our present-day
knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the
turning-point and vortex of so-called universal
history. For if one were to imagine the whole
incalculable sum of energy which has been used
up by that universal tendency, — employed, not in
the service of knowledge, but for the practical, i.e.,
egoistical ends of individuals and peoples, — then
probably the instinctive love of life would be so
much weakened in universal wars of destruction
and incessant migrations of peoples, that, owing
to the practice of suicide, the individual would
perhaps feel the last remnant of a sense of duty,
when, like the native of the Fiji Islands, as son
he strangles his parents and, as friend, his friend :
a practical pessimism which might even give rise
to a horrible ethics of general slaughter out of
pity — which, for the rest, exists and has existed
wherever art in one form or another, especially as
science and religion, has not appeared as a remedy
and preventive of that pestilential breath.

In view of this practical pessimism, Socrates is
the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who in
the above-indicated belief in the fathomableness of
the nature of things, attributes to knowledge and
perception the power of a universal medicine, and

Il8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

sees injerrpr evil in itself. To penetrate into the
depths of the nature of things, and to separate
true perception from error and illusion, appeared
to the Socratic man the noblest and even the only
tfuly~Tfuriran calling: just as frorrTTrie" time—of
Socrates onwards the mechanism of concepts, judg
ments, and inferences was prized above all other
capacities as the highest activity and the most
admirable gift of nature. Even the sublimest
moral acts, the stirrings of pity, of self-sacrifice, of
heroism, and that tranquillity of soul, so difficult
of attainment, which the Apollonian Greek called
Sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates, and his
like-minded successors up to the present day, from
the dialectics of knowledge, and were accordingly
designated as teachable. He who has experienced
in himself the joy of a Socratic perception, and
felt how it seeks to embrace, in constantly widening
circles, the entire world of phenomena, will thence
forth find no stimulus which could urge him to
existence more forcible than the desire to complete
that conquest and to knit the net impenetrably
close. To a person thus minded the Platonic
Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely
new form of " Greek cheerfulness " and felicity of
existence, which seeks to discharge itself in actions,
and will find its discharge for the most part in
maieutic and pedagogic influences on noble youths,
with a view to the ultimate production of genius.

But now science, spurred on by its powerful
illusion, hastens irresistibly to its limits, on which
its optimism, hidden in the essence of logic, is
wrecked. For the periphery of the circle of

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 119

science has an infinite number of points, and
while there is still no telling how this circle can
ever be completely measured, yet the noble and
gifted man, even before the middle of his career,
inevitably comes into contact with those extreme
points of the periphery where he stares at the
inexplicable. When he here sees to his dismay
how logic coils round itself at these limits and
finally bites its own tail — then the new form of
perception discloses itself, namely tragic perception,
which, in order even to be endured, requires art as
a safeguard and remedy.

If, with eyes strengthened and refreshed at the
sight of the Greeks, we look upon the highest
spheres of the world that surrounds us, we behold
the avidity of the insatiate optimistic knowledge,
of which Socrates is the typical representative,
transformed into tragic resignation and the need
of art : while, to be sure, this same avidity, in its
lower stages, has to exhibit itself as antagonistic to
art, and must especially have an inward detestation
of Dionyso-tragic art, as was exemplified in the
opposition of Socratism to ^Eschylean tragedy.

Here then with agitated spirit we knock at
the gates of the present and the future : will that
" transforming " lead to ever new configurations
of genius, and especially of the music-practising
Socrates? Will the net of art which is spread
over existence, whether under the name of religion
or of science, be knit always more closely and
delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds
under the restlessly barbaric activity and whirl
which is called " the present day " ? — Anxious,

I2O THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

yet not disconsolate, we stand aloof for a little
while, as the spectators who are permitted
to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles
and transitions. Alas ! It is the charm of these
struggles that he who beholds them must also
fight them !

1 6.

By this elaborate historical example we have
endeavoured to make it clear that tragedy perishes
as surely by the evanescence of the" spirit of music
as it can be born only out of this spirit. In order
to qualify the singularity of this assertion, and,
on the other hand, to disclose the source of this
insight of ours, we must now confront with clear
vision the analogous phenomena of the present
time ; we must enter into the midst of these
struggles, which, as I said just now, are being
carried on in the highest spheres of our present
world between the insatiate optimistic perception
and the tragic need of art. In so doing I shall
leave out of consideration all other antagonistic
tendencies which at all times oppose art, especially
tragedy, and which at present again extend their
sway triumphantly, to such an extent that of the
theatrical arts only the farce and the ballet, for
example, put forth their blossoms, which perhaps
not every one cares to smell, in tolerably rich
luxuriance. I will speak only of the Most Illus
trious Opposition to the tragic conception of things
— and by this I mean essentially optimistic
science, with its ancestor Socrates at the head of
it. Presently also the forces will be designated

THE BIRTH OK TRAGEDY. 121

which seem to me to guarantee a re-birth oj
tragedy — and who knows what other blessed hopes
for the German genius !

Before we plunge into the midst of these
struggles, let us array ourselves in the armour of
our hitherto acquired knowledge. In contrast to
all those who are intent on deriving the arts from
one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital
source of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed
on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo
and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living
and conspicuous representatives of tuuo worlds of
art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in
their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as
the transfiguring genius of the principium indi-
viduationis through which alone the redemption
in appearance is to be truly attained, while by the
mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individua-
tion is broken, and the way lies open to the
Mothers of Being,* to the innermost heart of
things. This extraordinary antithesis, which
opens up yawningly between plastic art as the
Apollonian and music as the Dionysian art, has
become_manifcst tQ only. one. of .the great thinkers,
to such an extent that, even without this key
to the symbolism of the Hellenic divinities, he
allow_ed to music a different character and origin
in advance of all the other arts, because, unlike
them, it is not a copy of the phenomenon, but a
direct copy of the will. itseJX~and "therefore reprc-
*i metapliysical \.

* Cf. Faust, Part II. Act i.-TR.

122 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon.
(Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
I. 310.) To this most important perception of
aesthetics (with which, taken in a serious sense,
aesthetics properly commences), Richard Wagner,
by way of confirmation of its eternal truth, affixed
his seal, when he asserted in his Beethoven that
music must be judged according to aesthetic prin
ciples quite different from those which apply to
the plastic arts, and not, in general, (according to
the category of beauty: although an erroneous
aesthetics, inspired by a misled and degenerate art,
has by virtue of the concept of beauty prevailing
in the plastic domain accustomed itself to demand
of music an effect analogous to that of the works
of plastic art, namely the suscitating of delight
in beautiful forms. Upon perceiving this extra
ordinary antithesis, I felt a strong inducement to
approach the essence of Greek tragedy, and, by
means of it, the profoundest revelation of Hellenic
genius : for I at last thought myself to be in posses
sion of a charm to enable me — far beyond the
phraseology of our usual aesthetics — to represent
vividly to my mind the primitive problem of
tragedy : whereby such an astounding insight into
the Hellenic character was afforded me that it
necessarily seemed as if our proudly comporting
classico-Hellenic science had thus far contrived
to subsist almost exclusively on phantasmagoria
and externalities.

Perhaps we may lead up to this primitive
problem with the question : what .aesthetic effect
results when the intrinsically separate art-powers,

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 123

the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into con
current actions ? Or, in briefer form : how is
rnjisic.rplat-p.fi {Q iniflgf .a.nd_, CQUCCJit ? — Schopen
hauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial
reference to this point, accredits with an unsur
passable clearness and perspicuity of exposition,
expresses himself most copiously on the subject
in the following passage which I shall cite here at
full length * ( Welt als Willc und Vorstcllung, I.
p. 309): " According to all this, we may regard
the phenomenal world, or natur.e^.and music as
two different expressions of the same thing.f which
is therefore itself the only medium of the analogy
between these two expressions, so that a know
ledge of this medium is required in order to
understand that analogy. Music, therefore, if
regarded as an expression of the world, is in
the highest degree a universal language, which
is related indeed to the universality of concepts,
much as these are related to the particular things.
Its universality, however, is by no means the
empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a
different kind, and is united with thorough and
distinct defmitcness. In this respect it resembles
geometrical figures and numbers, which are the
universal forms of all possible_qbjects of .experience
and applicable to them all a priori^ and yet are
not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly
determinate. All possible efforts, excitements

* Cf. World and Will as Idea, I. p. 339, trans, by Haklanc
and Kemp.

t That is " the will " as understood by Schopenhauer. —
TR.

124 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the
heart of man and that reason includes in the wide,
negative concept of feeling, may be expressed
by the infinite number of possible melodies, but
always in the .universality of mere form, without
the material, always according to the thing-in-
itself, not the phenomenon, — of which they repro
duce the very soul and essence as it were, without
the body. This deep relation which music bears
to the true nature of all things also explains the
fact that suitable music played to any scene,
action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose
to us its most secret meaning, and appears as
the most accurate and distinct commentary upon
it ; as also the fact that whoever gives himself
up entirely to the impression of a symphony
seems to see all the possible events of life and
the world take place in himself: nevertheless
upon reflection he can find no likeness between
the music and the things that passed before his
mind. For, as we have said, music is distinguished
from all the other arts by the fact that it is not
a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately,
the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the
direct copy of the will itself, and therefore
represents the metaphysical of everything physical
in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every
phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well
call the world embodied music as embodied will :
and this is the reason why music makes every
picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of
the world, at once appear with higher significance ;
all the more so, to be sure, in proportion as its

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 125

melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the
given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we
are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a
perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both
as an opera. Such particular pictures of human
life, set to the universal language of music, are
never bound to it or correspond to it with
stringent necessity, but stand to it only in the
relation of anexample chosen at will to a general
concept. Tn the deterrmnateness of the real
they represent that which rqusic expresses in the
universality of mere form. For melodies are to
ascertain extent, like general concepts, an abstrac
tion from the actual. This actual world, then,
the world of particular things, affords the object
of perception, the special and the individual, the
particular case, both to the universality of con
cepts and to the universality of the melodies.
Hut these two universalities are in a certain respect
opposed to each other ; for the concepts contain
only the forms, which are first of all abstracted
from perception, — the separated outward shell of
things, as it were, — and hence they are, in the
strictest sense of the term, abstracta ; music, on
the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which
precedes all forms, or the heart of things. This
relation may be very well expressed in the
language of the schoolmen, by saying : the con
cepts are the universalia post rem, but music gives
the universalia ante rem, and the real world the
universalia in re. — But that in general a relation
is possible between a composition and a perceptible
representation rests, as we have said, upon the

126 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

fact that both are simply different expressions of
the same inner being of the world. When now,
in the particular case, such a relation is actually
given, that is to say, when the composer has been
able to express in the universal language of music
the emotions of will which constitute the heart of
an event, then the melody of the song, the music
of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy
discovered by the composer between the two must
have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the
nature of the world unknown to his reason, and
must not be an imitation produced with conscious
intention by means of conceptions ; otherwise the
music does not express the inner nature of the
will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imita
tion of its phenomenon : all specially imitative
music does this."

We have therefore, according to the doctrine of
Schopenhauer, an immediate understanding of
music as the language of the will, and feel our
imagination stimulated to give form to this
invisible and yet so actively stirred spirit-world
which speaks to us, and prompted to embody it
in an analogous example. On the other hand,
image and concept, under the influence of a truly
conformable music, acquire a higher significance.
])ionysian_ajr.t, therefore is. .wont to exercise two
kinds of influences on the Apollonian art-faculty :
music firstly incites to. the symbolic intuition of
Dionysian. universality, and, secondly, it causes the
symbolic image to stand forth in its fu//esfji^m^c-_
ance. From these facts, intelligiHTeTrTThemselves
and not inaccessible to profounder observation,

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 127

I infer the capacity of music to give birth to »/?'///,
that is to say, the most significant exemplar, and
precisely, tragic myth : the myth which speaks of
Dionysian knowledge in symbols. In the pheno
menon of the lyrist, I have set forth that in him
music strives to express itself with regard to its
nature in Apollonian images. If now we reflect
that music in its highest potency must seek to
attain also to its highest symbolisation, we must
deem it possible that it also knows how to find
the symbolic expression of its inherent Dionysian
wisdom ; and where shall we have to seek for this
expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the
conception of the tragic ?

Jrom thejiature of art, as it is ordinarily con
ceived according to the single category of appear
ance and beauty, the tragic cannot be honestly
deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of
music that we understand the joy in the annihila
tion of the individual. For in the particular
examples of such annihilation only is the eternal
phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us,
which gives expression. to the will in its omnipo
tence, as it were, behind the prin dp ium individua-
tionis, the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and
in_ spite of all annihilation. The metaphysical
delight in the tragic is a translation of the instinct
ively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the
language of the scene : the hero, the highest
manifestation of the will, is disavowed for our
pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and
because the eternal life of the will is not affected
by his annihilation. " We believe in eternal life,"

128 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

tragedy exclaims ; while music is the proximate
idea of this life. Plastic art has an altogether
different object : here Apollo vanquishes the
suffering of the individual by the radiant glorifica
tion of the eternity of the phenomenon ; here beauty
triumphs over the suffering inherent in life ; pain
is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the
features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic
symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its
true undissembled voice : " Be as I am ! Amidst
the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally
creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to
existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change
of phenomena ! "

Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the
eternal joy of existence : only we are to seek this
joy not in phenomena, but behind phenomena.
We are to perceive how all that comes into being
must be ready for a sorrowful end ; we are com
pelled to look into the terrors of individual exist
ence — yet we are not to become torpid : a meta
physical comfort tears us momentarily from the
bustle of the transforming figures. We are really
for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel
its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence;
the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena,
now appear to us as something necessary, consider
ing the surplus of innumerable forms of existence
which throng and push one another into life, con
sidering the exuberant fertility of the universal
will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 1 29

these pains at the very moment when we have
become, as it were, one with the immeasurable
primordial joy in existence, and when we antici
pate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and
eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we
are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but
as the one living being, with whose procreative joy
we are blended.

The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now
tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art
of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music :
with which conception we believe we have done
justice for the first time to the original and most
astonishing significance of the chorus. At the
same time, however, we must admit that the im
port of tragic myth as set forth above never
became transparent with sufficient lucidity to the
Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers ;
their heroes speak, as it were, more superficially
than they act ; the myth does not at all find its
adequate objectification in the spoken word. The
structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images
reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can
put into words and concepts : the same being also
observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for in
stance, in an analogous manner talks more super
ficially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned
lesson of Hamlet is to be gathered not from his
words, but from a more profound contemplation
and survey of the whole. With respect to Greek
tragedy, which of course presents itself to us only
as word-drama, I have even intimated that the
incongruence between myth and expression might
I

130 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

easily tempt us to regard it as shallower and less
significant than it really is, and accordingly to
postulate for it a more superficial effect than it
must have had according to the testimony of the
ancients : for how easily one forgets that what
the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely
realising the highest spiritualisation and ideality
of myth, he might succeed in doing every moment
as creative musician ! We require, to be sure,
almost by philological method to reconstruct for
ourselves the ascendency of musical influence in
order to receive something of the incomrjarable
comfort which must be characteristic of true
tragedy. Even this musical ascendency, however,
would only have been felt by us as such had we
been Greeks : while in the entire development of
Greek music — as compared with the infinitely
richer music known and familiar to us — we imagine
we hear only the youthful song of the musical
genius intoned with a feeling of diffidence. The
Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal
children, and in tragic art also they are only
children who do not know what a sublime play
thing has originated under their hands and — is
being demolished.

That striving of the spirit of music for symbolic
and mythical manifestation, which increases from
the beginnings of lyric poetry to Attic tragedy,
breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attain
ing luxuriant development, and disappears, as it
were, from the surface of Hellenic art : while the
Dionysian view of things born of this striving lives
on in Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 131

and debasements, does not cease to attract earnest
natures. Will it not one day rise again as art out
of its mystic depth ?

Here the question occupies us, whether the power
by the counteracting influence of which tragedy
perished, has for all time strength enough to pre
vent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the
tragic view of things. If ancient tragedy was
driven from its course by the dialectical desire for
knowledge and the optimism of science, it might
be inferred that there is an eternal conflict between
tJie theoretic and the tragic view of things, and only
after the spirit of science has been led to its
boundaries, and its claim to universal validity has
been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries,
can we hope for a re-birth of tragedy : for which
form of culture we should have to use the symbol
of the music-practising Socrates in the sense spoken
of above. In this contrast, I understand by the
spirit of science the belief which first came to light
in the person of Socrates, — the belief in the fathom-
ableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.

He who recalls the immediate consequences of
this restlessly onward-pressing spirit of science
will realise at once that myth was annihilated by
it, and that, in consequence of this annihilation,
poetry was driven as a homeless being from her
natural ideal soil. If we have rightly assigned to
music the capacity to reproduce myth from itself,
we may in turn expect to find the spirit of science on
the path where it inimically opposes this mythopoeic
power of music. This takes place in the develop
ment of the New Attic Dithyramb, the music ol

132 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

which no longer expressed the inner essence, the
will itself, but only rendered the phenomenon in
sufficiently, in an imitation by means of concepts ;
from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly
musical natures turned away with the same re
pugnance that they felt for the art-destroying
tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of
Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when
it comprised Socrates himself, the tragedy of
Euripides, and the music of the new Dithyrambic
poets in the same feeling of hatred, and perceived in
all three phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate
culture. By this New Dithyramb, music has in an
outrageous manner been made the imitative portrait
of phenomena, for instance, of a battle or a storm
at sea, and has thus, of course, been entirely
deprived of its mythopoeic power. For if it
endeavours to excite our delight only by com
pelling us to seek external analogies between a
vital or natural process and certain rhythmical
figures and characteristic sounds of music ; if our
understanding is expected to satisfy itself with
the perception of these analogies, we are reduced
to a frame of mind in which the reception of the
mythical is impossible; for the myth as a -unique
exemplar of generality and truth towering_intp
the infinite, desires to be conspicuously perceived.
The truly Dionysian music presents itself to us as
such a general mirror of the universal will: the
conspicuous event which is refracted in this mirror
expands at once for our consciousness to the copy
of an eternal truth. Conversely, such a con-
spicious event is at once divested of every mythical

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 133

character by the tone-painting of the New
Dithyramb ; music has here become a wretched
copy of the phenomenon, and therefore infinitely
poorer than the phenomenon itself : through which
poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon
for our consciousness, so that now, for instance,
a musically imitated battle of this sort exhausts
itself in inarches, signal-sounds, etc., and our
imagination is arrested precisely by these super
ficialities. Tone-painting is therefore in every
respect the counterpart of true music with its
mythopoeic power : through it the phenomenon,
poor in itself, is made still poorer, while through
an isolated Dionysian music the phenomenon is
evolved and expanded into a picture of the world.
It was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian
spirit, when, in the development of the New
Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself and
reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides,
who, albeit in a higher sense, must be designated
as a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very
reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithy-
rambic Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter
employs all its effective turns and mannerisms.

In another direction also we see at work the
power of this un-Dionysian, myth-opposing spirit,
when we turn our eyes to the prevalence of
character representation and psychological refine
ment from Sophocles onwards. The character
must no longer be expanded into an eternal type,
but, on the contrary, must operate individually
through artistic by-traits and shadings, through
the nicest precision of all lines, in such a manner

134 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

that the spectator is in general no longer conscious
of the myth, but of the mighty nature-myth and
the imitative power of the artist. Here also we
observe the victory of the phenomenon over the
Universal, and the delight in the particular quasi-
anatomical preparation ; we actually breathe the
air of a theoretical world, in which scientific
knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic
reflection of a universal law. The movement
along the line of the representation of character
proceeds rapidly : while Sophocles still delineates
complete characters and employs myth for their
refined development, Euripides already delineates
only prominent individual traits of character, which
can express themselves in violent bursts of passion ;
in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only
masks with one expression : frivolous old men,
duped panders, and cunning slaves in untiring re
petition. Where now is the mythopoeic spirit of
music ? What is still left now of music is either
excitatory music or souvenir music, that is, either
a stimulant for dull and used-up nerves, or tone-
painting. As regards the former, it hardly matters
about the text set to it : the heroes and choruses
of Euripides are already dissolute enough when
once they begin to sing ; to what pass must things
have come with his brazen successors?

The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, manifests
itself most clearly in the denouements of the new
dramas. In the Old Tragedy one could feel at the
close the metaphysical comfort, without which the
delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all ; the
conciliating tones from another world sound purest,

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 135

perhaps, in the CEdipus at Colonus. Now that the
genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is,
strictly speaking, dead : for from whence could one
now draw the metaphysical comfort ? One sought,
therefore, for an earthly unravelment of the tragic
dissonance ; the hero, after he had been sufficiently
tortured by fate, reaped a well-deserved reward
through a superb marriage or divine tokens of
favour. The hero had turned gladiator, on whom,
after being liberally battered about and covered
with wounds, freedom was occasionally bestowed.
The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical
comfort. I will not say that the tragic view of
things was everywhere completely destroyed by the
intruding spirit of the un-Dionysian : we only know
that it was compelled to flee from art into the
under-world as it were, in the degenerate form of a
secret cult. Over the widest extent of the Hellenic
character, however, there raged the consuming
blast of this spirit, which manifests itself in the form
of "Greek cheerfulness," which we have already
spoken of as a senile, unproductive love of exist
ence ; this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the
splendid " nalvet^ " of the earlier Greeks, which, ac
cording to the characteristic indicated above, must be
conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian culture
growing out of a dark abyss, as the victory which
the Hellenic will, through its mirroring of beauty,
obtains over suffering and the wisdom of suffering.
The noblest manifestation of that other form of
" Greek cheerfulness," the Alexandrine, is the cheer
fulness of the theoretical man : it exhibits the same
symptomatic characteristics as I have just inferred

136 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

concerning the spirit of the un-Dionysian : — it com
bats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve
myth, it substitutes for metaphysical comfort an
earthly consonance, in fact, a deus ex machina of its
own, namely the god of machines and crucibles,
that is, the powers of the genii of nature recognised
and employed in the service of higher egoism ; it
believes in amending the world by knowledge, in
guiding life by science, and that it can really con
fine the individual within a narrow sphere of solv
able problems, where he cheerfully says to life : " I
desire thee : it is worth while to know thee."

1 8.

It is an eternal phenomenon : the avidious will
can always, by means of an illusion spread over
things, detain its creatures in life and compel them
to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of
knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby
to heal the eternal wound of existence ; another is
ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty fluttering
before his eyes ; still another by the metaphysical
comfort that eternal life flows on indestructibly
beneath the whirl of phenomena : to say nothing
of the more ordinary and almost more powerful
illusions which the will has always at hand. These
three specimens of illusion are on the whole designed
only for the more nobly endowed natures, who in
general feel profoundly the weight and burden of
existence, and must be deluded into forgetfulness
of their displeasure by exquisite stimulants. All
that we call culture is made up of these stimulants ;

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 137

and, according to the proportion of the ingredients,
we have either a specially Socratic or jr//'j//£ or
/• ,-^.v culture : or, i. '. ist< ri< al exem] lifii ati< ns are
wanted, there is either an Alexandrine or a Hel
lenic or a ftuddhistic culture.

Our whole modern world is entangled in the ~\
meshes of Alexandrine culture, and recognises as
its ideal the theorist equipped with the most potent
means of knowledge, and labouring in the service
of science, of whom the archetype and progenitor
is Socrates. All our educational methods have
originally this ideal in view : every other form
of existence must struggle onwards wearisomely
beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended.
In an almost alarming manner the cultured maff
was here found for a long time only in the form of
the scholar : even our poetical arts have been forced
to evolve from learned imitations, and in the main
effect of the rhyme we still recognise the origin of
our poetic form from artistic experiments with a
non-native and thoroughly learned language. How
unintelligible must Faust, the modern cultured man,
who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a true
Greek, — £ajjsU>storming discontentedly through all
the faculties, devoted to magic and the devil from a
desire for knowledge, whom we have only to place
alongside of Socrates for the purpose of comparison,
in order to see that modern man begins to divine
the boundaries of this Socratic love of perception
and longs for a coast in the wide waste of the ocean
of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said
to Eckcrmann with reference to Napoleon : " Yes,
my good friend, there is also a productiveness of

138 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

deeds," he reminded us in a charmingly naive
manner that the non-theorist is something incred
ible and astounding to modern man ; so that the
wisdom of Goethe is needed once more in order to
discover that such a surprising form of existence is
comprehensible, nay even pardonable.

Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is
concealed in the heart of this Socratic culture : Op
timism, deeming itself absolute ! Well, we must not
be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen, —
if society, leavened to the very lowest strata by this
kind of culture, gradually begins to tremble through
wanton agitations and desires, if the belief in the
earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possi
bility of such a general intellectual culture is gradu
ally transformed into the threatening demand for
such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into the
conjuring of a Euripidean deus ex machina. Let
us mark this well : the Alexandrine culture requires
a slave class, to be able to exist permanently : but,
in its optimistic view of life, it denies the necessity
of such a class, and consequently, when the effect
of its beautifully seductive and tranquillising utter
ances about the " dignity of man " and the " dignity
of labour " is spent, it gradually drifts towards a
dreadful destination. There is nothing more terrible
than a barbaric slave class, who have learned to
regard their existence as an injustice, and now pre
pare to take vengeance, not only for themselves, but
for all generations. In the face of such threaten
ing storms, who dares to appeal with confident
spirit to our pale and exhausted religions, which
even in their foundations have degenerated into

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 139

scholastic religions ? — so that myth, the necessary
prerequisite of every religion, is already paralysed
everywhere, and even in this domain the optimistic
spirit — which we have just designated as the anni
hilating germ of society — has attained the mastery.
While the evil slumbering in the heart of theor
etical culture gradually begins to disquiet modern
man, and makes him anxiously ransack the stores
of his experience for means to avert the danger,
though not believing very much in these means ;
while he, therefore, begins to divine the conse
quences his position involves : great, universally
gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible
amount of thought, to make use of the apparatus
of science itself, in order to point out the limits
and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus
definitely to deny the claim of science to universal
validity and universal ends : with which demon
stration the illusory notion was for the first time
recognised as such, which pretends, with the aid
of causality, to be able to fathom the innermost
essence of things. The extraordinary courage
and wisdom of Kant and ScJiopenhaiur have suc
ceeded in gaining the most difficult victory, the
victory over the optimism hidden in the essence
of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of our
culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently
unobjectionable aternce vcritates, believed in the
intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of
the world, and treated space, time, and causality
as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal
validity, Kant, on the other hand, showed that
these served in reality only to elevate the mere

140 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

phenomenon, the work of Maya, to the sole and
highest reality, putting it in place of the inner
most and true essence of things, thus making the
actual knowledge of this essence impossible, that
is, according to the expression of Schopenhauer,
to lull the dreamer still more soundly asleep ( Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung, I. 498). With this
knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture
to designate as a tragic culture ; the most import
ant characteristic of which is that wisdom takes
the place of science as the highest end, — wisdom,
which, uninfluenced by the seductive distractions
of the sciences, turns with unmoved eye to the
comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to
apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own
with sympathetic feelings of love. Let us imagine
a rising generation with this undauntedness of
vision, with this heroic desire for the prodigious,
let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-
slayers, the proud and daring spirit with which
they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines
of optimism in order " to live resolutely " in the
Whole and in the Full : would it not be necessary
for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-
discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a
new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, — namely,
tragedy, as the Hellena belonging to him, and that
he should exclaim with Faust :

Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsuchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt ? *

*Cf. Introduction, p. 14.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 14!

But now that the Socratic culture has been
shaken from two directions, and is only able to
hold the sceptre of its infallibility with trembling
hands, — once by the fear of its own conclusions
which it at length begins to surmise, and again,
because it is no longer convinced with its former
naive trust of the eternal validity of its foundation,
— it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of
its thought always rushes longingly on new forms,
to embrace them, and then, shuddering, lets them
go of a sudden, as Mephistopheles does the seduc
tive Lamiae. It is certainly the symptom of the
" breach " which all are wont to speak of as the
primordial suffering of modern culture that the
theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his
own conclusions, no longer dares to entrust him
self to the terrible ice-stream of existence : he runs
timidly up and down the bank. He no longer
wants to have anything entire, with all the natural
cruelty of things, so thoroughly has he been
spoiled by his optimistic contemplation. Besides,
he feels that a culture built up on the principles
of science must perish when it begins to grow
illogical, that is, to avoid its own conclusions.
Our art reveals this universal trouble : in vain does
one seek help by imitating all the great productive
periods and natures, in vain does one accumulate
the entire " world-literature " around modern man
for his comfort, in vain does one place one's self in
the midst of the art-styles and artists of all ages,
so that one may give names to them as Adam
did to the beasts : one still continues the eternal
hungerer, the " critic " without joy and energy, the

142 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

Alexandrine man, who is in the main a librarian
and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch
goes blind from the dust of books and printers'
errors.

19.

We cannot designate the intrinsic substance of
Socratic culture more distinctly than by calling it
the culture of the opera : for it is in this depart
ment that culture has expressed itself with special
naivete" concerning its aims and perceptions,
which is sufficiently surprising when we compare
the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic
development with the eternal truths of the
Apollonian and Dionysian. I call to mind first
of all the origin of the stilo rappresentativo and
the recitative. Is it credible that this thoroughly
externalised operatic music, incapable of devotion,
could be received and cherished with enthusiastic
favour, as a re-birth, as it were, of all true music,
by the very age in which the ineffably sublime
and sacred music of Palestrina had originated ?
And who, on the other hand, would think of
making only the diversion -craving luxuriousness
of those Florentine circles and the vanity of their
dramatic singers responsible for the love of the
opera which spread with such rapidity ? That in
the same age, even among the same people, thir,
passion for a half-musical mode of speech should
awaken alongside of the vaulted structure of
Palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian
Middle Age had been building up, I can explain

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 143

to myself only by a co-operating extra-artistic
tendency in the essence of the recitative.

The listener, who insists on distinctly hearing
the words under the music, has his wishes met by
the singer in that he speaks rather than sings,
and intensifies the pathetic expression of the
words in this half-song : by this intensification of
the pathos he facilitates the understanding of the
words and surmounts the remaining half of the
music. The specific danger which now threatens
him is that in some unguarded moment he may
give undue importance to music, which would
forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos
of the speech and the distinctness of the words :
while, on the other hand, he always feels himself
impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose
exhibition of vocal talent. Here the " poet "
comes to his aid, who knows how to provide him
with abundant opportunities for lyrical inter
jections, repetitions of words and sentences, etc.,
— at which places the singer, now in the purely
musical element, can rest himself without mind
ing the words. This alternation of emotionally
impressive, yet only half-sung speech and wholly
sung interjections, which is characteristic of the
stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing en
deavour to operate now on the conceptional and
representative faculty of the hearer, now on his
musical sense, is something so thoroughly un
natural and withal so intrinsically contradictory
both to the Apollonian and Dionysian artistic
impulses, that one has to infer an origin of the
recitative foreign to all artistic instincts. The

144 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

recitative must be defined, according to this
description, as the combination of epic and lyric
delivery, not indeed as an intrinsically stable
combination which could not be attained in the
case of such totally disparate elements, but an
entirely superficial mosaic conglutination, such as
is totally unprecedented in the domain of nature
and experience. But this was not the opinion of
the inventors of the recitative: they themselves, and
their age with them, believed rather that the
mystery of antique music had been solved by
this stilo rappresentativo, in which, as they thought,
the only explanation of the enormous influence of
an Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek
tragedy was to be found. The new style was
regarded by them as the re-awakening of the
most effective music, the Old Greek music :
indeed, with the universal and popular conception
of the Homeric world as the primitive world, they
could abandon themselves to the dream of having
descended once more into the paradisiac beginnings
of mankind, wherein music also must needs have
had the unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence
of which the poets could give such touching
accounts in their pastoral plays. Here we see
into the internal process of development of this
thoroughly modern variety of art, the opera: a
powerful need here acquires an art, but it is a
need of an unaesthetic kind : the yearning for the
idyll, the belief in the prehistoric existence of the
artistic, good man. The recitative was regarded
as the rediscovered language of this primitive
man ; the opera as the recovered land of this

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 145

tdyllically or heroically good creature, who in
every action follows at the same time a natural
artistic impulse, who sings a little along with all
he has to say, in order to sing immediately with
full voice on the slightest emotional excitement.
It is now a matter of indifference to us that
the humanists of those days combated the old
ecclesiastical representation of man as naturally
corrupt and lost, with this new-created picture of
the paradisiac artist : so that opera may be under
stood as the oppositional dogma of the good man,
whereby however a solace was at the same time
found for the pessimism to which precisely the
seriously-disposed men of that time were most
strongly incited, owing to the frightful uncertainty
of all conditions of life. It is enough to have
perceived that the intrinsic charm, and therefore
the genesis, of this new form of art lies in the
gratification of an altogether unxsthetic need, in
the optimistic glorification of man as such, in the
conception of the primitive man as the man
naturally good and artistic : a principle of the
opera which has gradually changed into a
threatening and terrible demand, which, in face of
the socialistic movements of the present time, we
can no longer ignore. The " good primitive man "
wants his rights : what paradisiac prospects !

I here place by way of parallel still another
equally obvious confirmation of my view that
opera is built up on the same principles as our
Alexandrine culture. Opera is the birth of the
theoretical man, of the critical layman, not of the
artist : one of the most surprising facts in the
K

146 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

whole history of art. It was the demand of
thoroughly unmusical hearers that the words must
above all be understood, so that according to
them a re-birth of music is only to be expected
when some mode of singing has been discovered
in which the text-word lords over the counter
point as the master over the servant. For the
words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the
accompanying harmonic system as the soul is
nobler than the body. It was in accordance with
the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that
the combination of music, picture and expression
was effected in the beginnings of the opera : in the
spirit of this aesthetics the first experiments were
also made in the leading laic circles of Florence
by the poets and singers patronised there. The
man incapable of art creates for himself a species
of art precisely because he is the inartistic man as
such. Because he does not divine the Dionysian
depth of music, he changes his musical taste into
appreciation of the understandable word-and-tone-
rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresentativo^
and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song ;
because he is unable to behold a vision, he forces
the machinist and the decorative artist into his
service; because he cannot apprehend the true
nature of the artist, he conjures up the " artistic
primitive man " to suit his taste, that is, the man
who sings and recites verses under the influence
of passion. He dreams himself into a time when
passion suffices to generate songs and poems : as
if emotion had ever been able to create anything
artistic. The postulate of the opera is a false

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 147

belief concerning the artistic process, in fact, the
idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist.
In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression
of the taste of the laity in art, who dictate their
laws with the cheerful optimism of the theorist.

Should we desire to unite in one the two con
ceptions just set forth as influential in the origin
of opera, it would only remain for us to speak of
an idyllic tendency of the opera : in which connec
tion we may avail ourselves exclusively of the
phraseology and illustration of Schiller.* " Nature
and the ideal," he says, " are either objects of grief,
when the former is represented as lost, the latter
unattained ; or both are objects of joy, in that they
are represented as real. The first case furnishes
the elegy in its narrower signification, the second
the idyll in its widest sense." Here we must at once
call attention to the common characteristic of these
two conceptions in operatic genesis, namely, that
in them the ideal is not regarded as unattained or
nature as lost. Agreeably to this sentiment, there
was a primitive age of man when he lay close to
the heart of nature, and, owing to this naturalness,
had attained the ideal of mankind in a paradisiac
goodness and artist-organisation : from which
perfect primitive man all of us were supposed to
be descended ; whose faithful copy we were in fact
still said to be : only we had to cast off some few
things in order to recognise ourselves once more
as this primitive man, on the strength of a voluntary
renunciation of superfluous learncdness, of super-

* Essay on Elegiac Poetry. — Tk.

148 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

abundant culture. It was to such a concord of
nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality, that the
cultured man of the Renaissance suffered himself
to be led back by his operatic imitation of Greek
tragedy ; he made use of this tragedy, as Dante
made use of Vergil, in order to be led up to the
gates of paradise : while from this point he went
on without assistance and passed over from an
imitation of the highest form of Greek art to a
" restoration of all things," to an imitation of man's
original art-world. What delightfully naive hope
fulness of these daring endeavours, in the very
heart of theoretical culture ! — solely to be ex
plained by the comforting belief, that " man-in-
himself " is the eternally virtuous hero of the opera,
the eternally fluting or singing shepherd, who must
always in the end rediscover himself as such, if he
has at any time really lost himself; solely the fruit
of the optimism, which here rises like a sweetishly
seductive column of vapour out of the depth of the
Socratic conception of the world.

The features of the opera therefore do not by any
means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss,
but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery,
the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which one
can at least represent to one's self each moment
as real : and in so doing one will perhaps surmise
some day that this supposed reality is nothing but
a fantastically silly dawdling, concerning which
every one, who could judge it by the terrible earnest
ness of true nature and compare it with the actual
primitive scenes of the beginnings of mankind,
would have to call out with loathing : Away with

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 149

the phantom ! Nevertheless one would err if one
thought it possible to frighten away merely by a
vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera,
as if it were a spectre. He who would destroy
the opera must join issue with Alexandrine cheer
fulness, which expresses itself so naYvely therein
concerning its favourite representation ; of which
in fact it is the specific form of art. But what is
to be expected for art itself from the operation of
a form of art, the beginnings of which do not at
all lie in the aesthetic province ; which has rather
stolen over from a half-moral sphere into the
artistic domain, and has been able only now and
then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin ?
By what sap is this parasitic opera-concern
nourished, if not by that of true art ? Must we
not suppose that the highest and indeed the truly
serious task of art — to free the eye from its glance
into the horrors of night and to deliver the
11 subject " by the healing balm of appearance
from the spasms of volitional agitations — will
degenerate under the influence of its idyllic seduc
tions and Alexandrine adulation to an empty
dissipating tendency, to pastime? What will
become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian
and Apollonian in such an amalgamation of styles
as I have exhibited in the character of the stilo
rappresentativo ? where music is regarded as the
servant, the text as the master, where music is com
pared with the body, the text with the soul ?
where at best the highest aim will be the realisa
tion of a paraphrastic tone-painting, just as formerly
iu the New Attic Dithyramb ? where music is com-

150 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

pletely alienated from its true dignity of being, the
Dionysian mirror of the world, so that the only
thing left to it is, as a slave of phenomena, to imitate
the formal character thereof, and to excite an ex
ternal pleasure in the play of lines and proportions.
On close observation, this fatal influence of the
opera on music is seen to coincide absolutely with
the universal development of modern music ; the
optimism lurking in the genesis of the opera and
in the essence of culture represented thereby, has,
with alarming rapidity, succeeded in divesting
music of its Dionyso-cosmic mission and in im
pressing on it a playfully formal and pleasurable
character : a change with which perhaps only the
metamorphosis of the ^Eschylean man into the
cheerful Alexandrine man could be compared.

If, however, in the exemplification herewith in
dicated we have rightly associated the evanescence
of the Dionysian spirit with a most striking, but
hitherto unexplained transformation and degener
ation of the Hellene — what hopes must revive in
us when the most trustworthy auspices guarantee
the reverse process^ the gradual awakening of the
Dionysian spirit in our modern world ! It is im
possible for the divine strength of Herakles to lan
guish for ever in voluptuous bondage to Omphale.
Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit
a power has arisen which has nothing in common
with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture,
and can neither be explained nor excused thereby,
but is rather regarded by this culture as something
terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile,
— namely, German music as we have to understand

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 151

it, especially in its vast solar orbit from Bach to
Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What
even under the most favourable circumstances can
the knowledge-craving Socratism of our days do
with this demon rising from unfathomable depths ?
Neither by means of the zig-zag and arabesque
work of operatic melody, nor with the aid of the
arithmetical counting board of fugue and contra
puntal dialectics is the formula to be found, in the
trebly powerful light * of which one could subdue
this demon and compel it to speak. What a
spectacle, when our aesthetes, with a net of
" beauty " peculiar to themselves, now pursue and
clutch at the genius of music romping about before
them with incomprehensible life, and in so doing
display activities which are not to be judged by
the standard of eternal beauty any more than by
the standard of the sublime. Let us but observe
these patrons of music as they are, at close range,
when they call out so indefatigably "beauty!
beauty ! " to discover whether they have the
marks of nature's darling children who are fostered
and fondled in the lap of the beautiful, or whether
they do not rather seek a disguise for their own
rudeness, an aesthetical pretext for their own
unemotional insipidity : I am thinking here, for
instance, of Otto Jahn. But let the liar and the
hypocrite beware of our German music : for in
the midst of all our culture it is really the only
genuine, pure and purifying fire-spirit from which
and towards which, as in the teaching of the great

* See Faust, Part I. 1. 965 — TR.

152 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double
orbit • all that we now call culture, education,
civilisation, must appear some day before the
unerring judge, Dionysus.

Let us recollect furthermore how Kant and
Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of
German philosophy streaming from the same
sources to annihilate the satisfied delight in ex
istence of scientific Socratism by the delimitation
of the boundaries thereof; how through this
delimitation an infinitely profounder and more
serious view of ethical problems and of art was
inaugurated, which we may unhesitatingly desig
nate as Dionysian wisdom comprised in concepts.
To what then does the mystery of this oneness of
German music and philosophy point, if not to a
new form of existence, concerning the substance
of which we can only inform ourselves presen-
tiently from Hellenic analogies ? For to us who
stand on the boundary line between two different
forms of existence, the Hellenic prototype retains
the immeasurable value, that therein all these
transitions and struggles are imprinted in a
classically instructive form : except that we, as it
were, experience analogically in reverse order the
chief epochs of the Hellenic genius, and seem now,
for instance, to pass backwards from the Alex
andrine age to the period of tragedy. At the
same time we have the feeling that the birth of a
tragic age betokens only a return to itself of the
German spirit, a blessed self-rediscovering after
excessive and urgent external influences have for
a long time compelled it, living as it did in

THK BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 153

helpless barbaric formlessness, to servitude under
their form. It may at last, after returning to the
primitive source of its being, venture to stalk
along boldly and freely before all nations without
hugging the leading-strings of a Romanic civilisa
tion : if only it can learn implicitly of one people
— the Greeks, of whom to learn at all is itself a
high honour and a rare distinction. And when
did we require these highest of all teachers more
than at present, when we experience a re-birth of
tragedy and are in danger alike of not knowing
whence it comes, and of being unable to make
clear to ourselves whither it tends.

20.

It may be weighed some day before an
impartial judge, in what time and in what men
the German spirit has thus far striven most reso
lutely to learn of the Greeks : and if we con
fidently assume that this unique praise must
be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of
Goethe, Schiller, and Winkelmann, it will cer
tainly have to be added that since their time, and
subsequently to the more immediate influences of
these efforts, the endeavour to attain to culture
and to the Greeks by this path has in an in
comprehensible manner grown feebler and feebler.
In order not to despair altogether of the German
spirit, must we not infer therefrom that possibly,
in some essential matter, even these champions
could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic
nature, and were unable to establish a permanent

154 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

friendly alliance between German and Greek cul
ture ? So that perhaps an unconscious perception
of this shortcoming might raise also in more
serious minds the disheartening doubt as to
whether after such predecessors they could ad
vance still farther on this path of culture, or could
reach the goal at all. Accordingly, we see the
opinions concerning the value of Greek contribu
tion to culture degenerate since that time in the
most alarming manner; the expression of com
passionate superiority may be heard in the most
heterogeneous intellectual and non - intellectual
camps, and elsewhere a totally ineffective declama
tion dallies with "Greek harmony," " Greek beauty,"
" Greek cheerfulness." And in the very circles
whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably
from the Greek channel for the good of German
culture, in the circles of the teachers in the higher
educational institutions, they have learned best to
compromise with the Greeks in good time and
on easy terms, to the extent often of a sceptical
abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total
perversion of the true purpose of antiquarian
studies. If there be any one at all in these
circles who has not completely exhausted himself
in the endeavour to be a trustworthy corrector of
old texts or a natural-history microscopist of
language, he perhaps seeks also to appropriate
Grecian antiquity " historically " along with other
antiquities, and in any case according to the
method and with the supercilious air of our
present cultured historiography. When, therefore,
the intrinsic efficiency of the higher educational

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 155

institutions has never perhaps been lower or
feebler than at present, when the " journalist," the
paper slave of the day, has triumphed over the
academic teacher in all matters pertaining to
culture, and there only remains to the latter the
often previously experienced metamorphosis of
now fluttering also, as a cheerful cultured butterfly,
in the idiom of the journalist, with the " light
elegance" peculiar thereto — with what painful
confusion must the cultured persons of a period
like the present gaze at the phenomenon (which
can perhaps be comprehended analogically only
by means of the profoundest principle of the
hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius) of the
reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the
re-birth of tragedy ? Never has there been
another art-period in which so-called culture and
true art have been so estranged and opposed, as
is so obviously the case at present. We under
stand why so feeble a culture hates true art ; it
fears destruction thereby. Hut must not an
entire domain of culture, namely the Socratic-
Alexandrine, have exhausted its powers after
contriving to culminate in such a daintily-tapering
point as our present culture ? When it was not
permitted to heroes like Goethe and Schiller to
break open the enchanted gate which leads into
the Hellenic magic mountain, when with their
most dauntless striving they did not get beyond
the longing gaze which the Gocthcan Iphigenia
cast from barbaric Tauris to her home across the
ocean, what could the epigones of such heroes
hope for, if the gate should not open to them

156 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

suddenly of its own accord, in an entirely differ
ent position, quite overlooked in all endeavours of
culture hitherto — amidst the mystic tones of
reawakened tragic music.

Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an
impending re-birth of Hellenic antiquity ; for in it
alone we find our hope of a renovation and puri
fication of the German spirit through the fire-
magic of music. What else do we know of
amidst the present desolation and languor of
culture, which could awaken any comforting ex
pectation for the future ? We look in vain for
one single vigorously-branching root, for a speck
of fertile and healthy soil : there is dust, sand,
torpidness and languishing everywhere ! Under
such circumstances a cheerless solitary wanderer
could choose for himself no better symbol than
the Knight with Death and the Devil, as Durer
has sketched him for us, the mail-clad knight,
grim and stern of visage, who is able, unperturbed
by his gruesome companions, and yet hopelessly,
to pursue his terrible path with horse and hound
alone. Our Schopenhauer was such a Durerian
knight : he was destitute of all hope, but he sought
the truth. There is not his equal.

But how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilder
ness of our exhausted culture changes when the
Dionysian magic touches it ! A hurricane seizes
everything decrepit, decaying, collapsed, and
stunted ; wraps it whirlingly into a red cloud of
dust ; and carries it like a vulture into the air.
Confused thereby, our glances seek for what has
vanished : for what they see is something risen to

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 157

the golden light as from a depression, so full and
green, so luxuriantly alive, so ardently infinite.
Tragedy sits in the midst of this exuberance of
life, sorrow and joy, in sublime ecstasy ; she listens
to a distant doleful song — it tells of the Mothers
of Being, whose names are : Wa/m, Wille, Wehe*
—Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian
life and in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of
the Socratic man is past : crown yourselves with
ivy, take in your hands the thyrsus, and do not
marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning
at your feet. Dare now to be tragic men, for
ye are to be redeemed ! Ye are to accompany
the Dionysian festive procession from India to
Greece ! Equip yourselves for severe conflict, but
believe in the wonders of your god !

21.

Gliding back from these hortative tones into
the mood which befits the contemplative man, I
repeat that it can only be learnt from the Greeks
what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of
tragedy must signify for the essential basis of a
people's life. It is the people of the tragic
mysteries who fight the battles with the Persians :
and again, the people who waged such wars
required tragedy as a necessary healing potion.
Who would have imagined that there was still
such a uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest
political sentiments, the most natural domestic

Whim, will, woe.

158 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

instincts and the primitive manly delight in strife
in this very people after it had been shaken to its
foundations for several generations by the most
violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon ? If
at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian
commotion one always perceives that the Dionys
ian loosing from the shackles of the individual
makes itself felt first of all in an increased en
croachment on the political instincts, to the
extent of indifference, yea even hostility, it is
certain, on the other hand, that the state-forming
Apollo is also the genius of the principium in-
dividuationis, and that the state and domestic
sentiment cannot live without an assertion of
individual personality. There is only one way
from orgasm for a people, — the way to Indian
Buddhism, which, in order to be at all endured
with its longing for nothingness, requires the rare
ecstatic states with their elevation above space,
time, and the individual ; just as these in turn
demand a philosophy which teaches how to over
come the indescribable depression of the inter
mediate states by means of a fancy. With the
same necessity, owing to the unconditional
dominance of political impulses, a people drifts
into a path of extremest secularisation, the most
magnificent, but also the most terrible expression
of which is the Roman imperium.

Placed between India and Rome, and con
strained to a seductive choice, the Greeks suc
ceeded in devising in classical purity still a third
form of life, not indeed for long private use, but
just on that account for immortality. For it

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 159

holds true in all things that those whom the gods
love die young, but, on the other hand, it holds
equally true that they then live eternally with the
gods. One must not demand of what is most
noble that it should possess the durable toughness
of leather; the staunch durability, which, for
instance, was inherent in the national character
of the Romans, does not probably belong to the
indispensable predicates of perfection. But if we
ask by what physic it was possible for the Greeks,
in their best period, notwithstanding the extra
ordinary strength of their Dionysian and political
impulses, neither to exhaust themselves by ecstatic
brooding, nor by a consuming scramble for empire
and worldly honour, but to attain the splendid
mixture which we find in a noble, inflaming, and
contemplatively disposing wine, we must remember
the enormous power of tragedy, exciting, purifying,
and disburdening the entire life of a people ; the
highest value of which we shall divine only when,
as in the case of the Greeks, it appears to us as
the essence of all the prophylactic healing forces,
as the mediator arbitrating between the strongest
and most inherently fateful characteristics of a
people.

Tragedy absorbs the highest musical orgasm
into itself, so that it absolutely brings music to
perfection among the Greeks, as among ourselves ;
but it then places alongside thereof tragic myth
and the tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan,
takes the entire Dionysian world on his shoulders
and disburdens us thereof; while, on the other
hand, it is able by means of this same tragic

l6O THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

myth, in the person of the tragic hero, to deliver
us from the intense longing for this existence, and
reminds us with warning hand of another exist
ence and a higher joy, for which the struggling
hero prepares himself presentiently by his de
struction, not by his victories. Tragedy sets a
sublime symbol, namely the myth between the
universal authority of its music and the receptive
Dionysian hearer, and produces in him the illusion
that music is only the most effective means for
the animation of the plastic world of myth.
Relying upon this noble illusion, she can now
move her limbs for the dithyrambic dance, and
abandon herself unhesitatingly to an orgiastic
feeling of freedom, in which she could not venture
to indulge as music itself, without this illusion.
The myth protects us from the music, while, on
the other hand, it alone gives the highest freedom
thereto. By way of return for this service, music
imparts to tragic myth such an impressive and
convincing metaphysical significance as could
never be attained by word and image, without
this unique aid ; and the tragic spectator in par
ticular experiences thereby the sure presentiment
of supreme joy to which the path through destruc-.
tion and negation leads ; so that he thinks he
hears, as it were, the innermost abyss of things
speaking audibly to him.

If in these last propositions I have succeeded
in giving perhaps only a preliminary expres
sion, intelligible to few at first, to this difficult
representation, I must not here desist from
stimulating my friends to a further attempt, or

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. l6l

cease from beseeching them to prepare themselves,
by a detached example of our common experience,
for the perception of the universal proposition.
In this example I must not appeal to those who
make use of the pictures of the scenic processes,
the words and the emotions of the performers, in
order to approximate thereby to musical perception;
for none of these speak music as their mother-
tongue, and, in spite of the aids in question, do
not get farther than the precincts of musical
perception, without ever being allowed to touch
its innermost shrines ; some of them, like
Gervinus, do not even reach the precincts by this
path. I have only to address myself to those
who, being immediately allied to music, have it
as it were for their mother's lap, and are connected
with things almost exclusively by unconscious
musical relations. I ask the question of these
genuine musicians : whether they can imagine a
man capable of hearing the third act of Tristan
und Isolde without any aid of word or scenery,
purely as a vast symphonic period, without
expiring by a spasmodic distention of all the
wings of the soul ? A man who has thus, so to
speak, put his ear to the heart-chamber of the
cosmic will, who feels the furious desire for ex
istence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream
or most gently dispersed brook, into all the veins
of the world, would he not collapse all at once?
Could he endure, in the wretched fragile tenement
of the human individual, to hear the re-echo of
countless cries of joy and sorrow from the " vast
void of cosmic night," without flying irresistibly
L

1 62 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

towards his primitive home at the sound of this
pastoral dance-song of metaphysics ? But if, never
theless, such a work can be heard as a whole,
without a renunciation of individual existence, if
such a creation could be created without demolish
ing its creator — where are we to get the solution
of this contradiction ?

Here there interpose between our highest
musical excitement and the music in question the
tragic myth and the tragic hero — in reality only
as symbols of the most universal facts, of which
music alone can speak directly. If, however, we
felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol
would stand by us absolutely ineffective and
unnoticed, and would never for a moment prevent
us from giving ear to the re-echo of the universalia
ante rem. Here, however, the Apollonian power,
with a view to the restoration of the well-nigh
shattered individual, bursts forth with the healing
balm of a blissful illusion : all of a sudden we im
agine we see only Tristan, motionless, with hushed
voice saying to himself: " the old tune, why does it
wake me ? " And what formerly interested us like
a hollow sigh from the heart of being, seems now
only to tell us how " waste and void is the sea."
And when, breathless, we thought to expire by a
convulsive distention of all our feelings, and only
a slender tie bound us to our present existence,
we now hear and see only the hero wounded to
death and still not dying, with his despairing
cry : " Longing ! Longing ! In dying still longing !
for longing not dying ! " And if formerly, after
such a surplus and superabundance of consuming

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 163

agonies, the jubilation of the born rent our hearts
almost like the very acme of agony, the rejoic
ing Kurwenal now stands between us and the
"jubilation as such," with face turned toward the
ship which carries Isolde. However powerfully
fellow-suffering encroaches upon us, it nevertheless
delivers us in a manner from the primordial
suffering of the world, just as the symbol-image
of the myth delivers us from the immediate per
ception of the highest cosmic idea, just as the
thought and word deliver us from the unchecked
effusion of the unconscious will. The glorious
Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if the very
realm of tones presented itself to us as a plastic
cosmos, as if even the fate of Tristan and Isolde
had been merely formed and moulded therein
as out of some most delicate and impressible
material.

Thus does the Apollonian wrest us from
Dionysian nniversality and fill us with rapture for
individuals ; to these it rivets our sympathetic
emotion, through these it satisfies the sense of
beauty which longs for great and sublime forms ;
it brings before us biographical portraits, and
incites us to a thoughtful apprehension of the
essence of life contained therein. With the
immense potency of the image, the concept, the
ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion —
the Apollonian influence uplifts man from his
orgiastic self-annihilation, and beguiles him con
cerning the universality of the Dionysian process
into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture
of the world, for instance, Tristan and Isolde,

1 64 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

and that, through music, he will be enabled to
see it still more clearly and intrinsically. What
can the healing magic of Apollo not accom
plish when it can even excite in us the illusion
that the Dionysian is actually in the service
of the Apollonian, the effects of which it is
capable of enhancing; yea, that music is essen
tially the representative art for an Apollonian
substance ?

With the pre-established harmony which obtains
between perfect drama and its music, the drama
attains the highest degree of conspicuousness, such
as is usually unattainable in mere spoken drama.
As all the animated figures of the scene in the
independently evolved lines of melody simplify
themselves before us to the distinctness of the
catenary curve, the coexistence of t^hese lines is
also audible in the harmonic change which sym
pathises in a most delicate manner with the evolved
process : through which change the relations of
things become immediately perceptible to us in
a sensible and not at all abstract manner, as we
likewise perceive thereby that it is only in these
relations that the essence of a character and of a
line of melody manifests itself clearly. And while
music thus compels us to see more extensively and
more intrinsically than usual, and makes us spread
out the curtain of the scene before ourselves like
some delicate texture, the world of the stage is
as infinitely expanded for our spiritualised, intro
spective eye as it is illumined outwardly from
within. How can the word-poet furnish anything
analogous, who strives to attain this internal ex-

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 165

pansion and illumination of the visible stage-world
by a much more imperfect mechanism and an
indirect path, proceeding as he does from word
and concept? Albeit musical tragedy likewise
avails itself of the word, it is at the same time able
to place alongside thereof its basis and source, and
can make the unfolding of the word, from within
outwards, obvious to us.

Of the process just set forth, however, it could
still be said as decidedly that it is only a glorious
appearance, namely the afore-mentioned Apollonian
illusion, through the influence of which we are to
be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and
excess. In point of fact, the relation of music
to drama is precisely the reverse ; music is the
adequate idea of the world, drama is but the
reflex of this idea, a detached umbrage thereof.
The identity between the line of melody and
the !r ing form, between the harmony and the
character-relations of this form, is true in a sense
antithetical to what one would suppose on the
contemplation of musical tragedy. We may
agitate and enliven the form in the most con-
.^picuous manner, and enlighten it from within, but
it still continues merely phenomenon, from which
there is no bridge to lead us into the true reality,
into the heart of the world. Music, however,
speaks out of this heart ; and though countless
phenomena of the kind might be passing manifes
tations of this music, they could never exhaust its
essence, but would always be merely its externalised
copies Of course, as regards the intricate relation
of music and drama, nothing can be explained,

1 66 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

while all may be confused by the popular and
thoroughly false antithesis of soul and body ; but
the unphilosophical crudeness of this antithesis
seems to have become — who knows for what
reasons — a readily accepted Article of Faith
with our aestheticians, while they have learned
nothing concerning an antithesis of phenomenon
and thing-in-itself, or perhaps, for reasons equally
unknown, have not cared to learn anything
thereof.

Should it have been established by our analysis
that the Apollonian element in tragedy has by
means of its illusion gained a complete victory
over the Dionysian primordial element of music,
and has made music itself subservient to its end,
namely, the highest and clearest elucidation of the
drama, it would certainly be necessary to add
the very important restriction : that at the most
essential point this Apollonian illusion is dissolved
and annihilated. The drama, which, by the aid of
music, spreads out before us with such inwardly
illumined distinctness in all its movements and
figures, that we imagine we see the texture unfold
ing on the loom as the shuttle flies to and fro, —
attains as a whole an effect which transcends all
Apollonian artistic effects. In the collective effect
of tragedy, the Dionysian gets the upper hand
once more ; tragedy ends with a sound which
could never emanate from the realm of Apollonian
art. And the Apollonian illusion is thereby found
to be what it is, — the assiduous veiling during the
performance of tragedy of the intrinsically Diony
sian effect : which, however, is so powerful, that it

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 167

finally forces the Apollonian drama itself into a
sphere where it begins to talk with Dionysian
wisdom, and even denies itself and its Apollonian
conspicuousness. Thus then the intricate relation
of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy
must really be symbolised by a fraternal union of
the two deities : Dionysus speaks the language of
Apollo ; Apollo, however, finally speaks the lan
guage of Dionysus ; and so the highest goal of
tragedy and of art in general is attained.

22.

Let the attentive friend picture to himself purely
and simply, according to his experiences, the effect
of a true musical tragedy. I think I have so por
trayed the phenomenon of this effect in both its
phases that he will now be able to interpret his
own experiences. For he will recollect that with
regard to the myth which passed before him he
felt himself exalted to a kind of omniscience, as if
his visual faculty were no longer merely a surface
faculty, but capable of penetrating into the interior,
and as if he now saw before him, with the aid of
music, the ebullitions of the will, the conflict of
motives, and the swelling stream of the passions,
almost sensibly visible, like a plenitude of actively
moving lines and figures, and could thereby dip into
the most tender secrets of unconscious emotions.
While he thus becomes conscious of the highest
exaltation of his instincts for conspicuousness and
transfiguration, he nevertheless feels with equal

1 68 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

definitiveness that this long series of Apollonian
artistic effects still does not generate the blissful
continuance in will-less contemplation which the
plasticist and the epic poet, that is to say, the
strictly Apollonian artists, produce in him by their
artistic productions : to wit, the justification of the
world of the individuatio attained in this contempla
tion, — which is the object and essence of Apollonian
art. He beholds the transfigured world of the stage
and nevertheless denies it. He sees before him the
tragic hero in epic clearness and beauty, and never
theless delights in his annihilation. He compre
hends the incidents of the scene in all their details,
and yet loves to flee into the incomprehensible.
He feels the actions of the hero to be justified, anal
is nevertheless still more elated when these actions
annihilate their originator. He shudders at the
sufferings which will befall the hero, and yet antici
pates therein a higher and much more overpowering
joy. He sees more extensively and profoundly
than ever, and yet wishes to be blind. Whence
must we derive this curious internal dissension,
this collapse of the Apollonian apex, if not from
the Dionysian spell, which, though apparently
stimulating the Apollonian emotions to their high
est pitch, can nevertheless force this superabundance
of Apollonian power into its service ? Tragic myth
is to be understood only - as -a- -^ytnEoIi SH tiqa. ~of
Dionysian wisdom by means of—the.. expedients _of
Apollonian art : the mythus conducts the world
of phenomena to its boundaries, where it denies
itself, and seeks to flee back again into the bosom
of the true and only reality ; where it then, like

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 169

Isolde, seems to strike up its metaphysical swan-
song : —

In des Wonnemeeres
wogendem Schwall,
in der Duft-Wellen
tonendem Schall,
in des Weltathems
wehendem All —
ertrinken — versinken —
unbewusst — hochste Lust ! *

We thus realise to ourselves in the experiences
of the truly aesthetic hearer the tragic artist him
self when he proceeds like a luxuriously fertile
divinity of individuation to create his figures (in
which sense his work can hardly be understood as
an " imitation of nature ") — and when, on the other
hand, his vast Dionysian impulse then absorbs the
entire world of phenomena, in order to anticipate
beyond it, and through its annihilation, the highest
artistic primal joy, in the bosom of the Primordial
Unity. Of course, our aesthetes have nothing to
say about this return in fraternal union of the two
art-deities to the original home, nor of either the
Apollonian or Dionysian excitement of the hearer,

* In the sea of pleasure's
Billowing roll,
In the ether-waves
Knelling and toll,
In the world-breath's
Wavering whole —
To drown in, go down in —
Lost in swoon— greatest boon I

170 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

while they are indefatigable in characterising the
struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the
moral order of the world, or the disburdenment of
the emotions through tragedy, as the properly
Tragic : an indefatigableness which makes me think
that they are perhaps not aesthetically excitable
men at all, but only to be regarded as moral
beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aris
totle has an explanation of the tragic effect been
proposed, by which an aesthetic activity of the
hearer could be inferred from artistic circumstances.
At one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced
to an alleviating discharge through the serious pro
cedure, at another time we are expected to feel
elevated and inspired at the triumph of good and
noble principles, at the sacrifice of the hero in the
interest of a moral conception of things ; and how
ever certainly I believe that for countless men
precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy,
it as obviously follows therefrom that all these,
together with their interpreting aesthetes, have had
no experience of tragedy as the highest art. The
pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle,
which philologists are at a loss whether to include
under medicinal or moral phenomena, recalls a
remarkable anticipation of Goethe. " Without a
lively pathological interest," he says, " I too have
never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation
of any kind, and hence I have rather avoided than
sought it. Can it perhaps have been still another
of the merits of the ancients that the deepest
pathos was with them merely aesthetic play,
whereas with us the truth of nature must co-

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. I/I

operate in order to produce such a work ? " We
can now answer in the affirmative this latter pro
found question after our glorious experiences, in
which we have found to our astonishment in the
case of musical tragedy itself, that thCL.dccjjgst
pathos can in reality be merely aesthetic play : and
therefore we are justified in believing that now for
the first time the proto-phenomenon of the tragic
can be portrayed with some degree of success. He
who now will still persist in talking only of those
vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-aesthetic
spheres, and does not feel himself raised above
the pathologically-moral process, may be left to
despair of his aesthetic nature : for which we re
commend to him, by way of innocent equivalent,
the interpretation of Shakespeare after the fashion
of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic
justice.

Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the esthetic
hearer is also born anew, in whose place in the
theatre a curious quid pro quo was wont to sit
with half-moral and half-learned pretensions, — the
"critic." In his sphere hitherto everything has
been artificial and merely glossed over with a
semblance of life. The performing artist was in
fact at a loss what to do with such a critically-
comporting hearer, and hence he, as well as the
dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him.
searched anxiously for the last remains of life in
a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of
enjoyment. Such " critics," however, have hitherto
constituted the public ; the student, the school
boy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature,

172 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

were already unwittingly prepared by education
and by journals for a similar perception of works
of art. The nobler natures among the artists
counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces
in such a public, and the appeal to a moral order
of the world operated vicariously, when in reality
some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured
the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at
all events exciting tendency of the contemporary
political and social world was presented by the
dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could
forget his critical exhaustion and abandon himself
to similar emotions, as, in patriotic or warlike
moments, before the tribune of parliament, or at
the condemnation of crime and vice : — an estrange
ment of the true aims of art which could not but
lead directly now and then to a cult of tendency.
But here there took place what has always taken
place in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary
rapid depravation of these tendencies, so that for
instance the tendency to employ the theatre as a
means for the moral education of the people,
which in Schiller's time was taken seriously, is
already reckoned among the incredible antiquities
of a surmounted culture, While the critic got
the upper hand in the Theatre and concert-hall,
the journalist in the school, and the press in society,
art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the
most trivial kind, and aesthetic criticism was used
as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and
moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the sig
nificance of which is suggested by the Schopen-
hauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 173

has never been so much gossip about art and so
little esteem for it. But is it still possible to
have intercourse with a man capable of conversing
on Beethoven or Shakespeare ? Let each answer
this question according to his sentiments : he will
at any rate show by his answer his conception of
" culture," provided he tries at least to answer the
question, and has not already grown mute with
astonishment.

On the other hand, many a one more nobly
and delicately endowed by nature, though he may
have gradually become a critical barbarian in the
manner described, could tell of the unexpected as
well as totally unintelligible effect which a success
ful performance of Loliengrin, for example, exerted
on him : except that perhaps every warning and
interpreting hand was lacking to guide him ; so
that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and alto
gether incomparable sensation which then affected
him also remained isolated and became extinct,
like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He
then divined what the aesthetic hearer is.

23.

He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to
how he is related to the true aesthetic hearer, or
whether he belongs rather to the community of
the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire
sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he
accepts the wonder represented on the stage :
whether he feels his historical sense, which insists
on strict psychological causality, insulted by it,

174 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

whether with benevolent concession he as it were
admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible
to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether
he experiences anything else thereby. For he
will thus be enabled to determine how far he is
on the v whole capable of understanding myth, that
is to say, the concentrated picture of the world,
which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot
dispense with wonder. It is probable, however,
that nearly every one, upon close examination,
feels so disintegrated by the critico-historical spirit
of our culture, that he can only perhaps make the
former existence of myth credible to himself by
learned means through intermediary abstractions.
Without myth, however, every culture loses its
healthy creative natural power : it is only a horizon
encompassed with myths which rounds off to
unity a social movement. It is only by myth
that all the powers of the imagination and of the
Apollonian dream are freed from their random
rovings. The mythical figures have to be the
invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of
which the young soul grows to maturity, by the
signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life
and struggles : and the state itself knows no
more powerful unwritten law than the mythical
foundation which vouches for its connection with
religion and its growth from mythical ideas.

Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract
man proceeding independently of myth, the
abstract education, the abstract usage, the abstract
right, the abstract state : let us picture to our
selves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination,

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 175

not bridled by any native myth : let us imagine
a culture which has no fixed and sacred primitive
seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities,
and has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other
cultures — such is the Present, as the result of
Socratism, which is bent on the destruction of
myth. And now the myth-less man remains
eternally hungering among all the bygones, and
digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig
for them even among the remotest antiquities.
The stupendous historical exigency of the un
satisfied modern culture, the gathering around one
of countless other cultures, the consuming desire
for knowledge — what does all this point to, if
not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical
home, the mythical source ? Let us ask ourselves
whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of
this culture is aught but the eager seizing and
snatching at food of the hungerer — and who would
care to contribute anything more to a culture
which cannot be appeased by all it devours, and
in contact with which the most vigorous and
wholesome nourishment is wont to change into
" history and criticism " ?

We should also have to regard our German
character with despair and sorrow, if it had already
become inextricably entangled in, or even identical
with this culture, in a similar manner as we can
observe it to our horror to be the case in civilised
France ; and that which for a long time was the
great advantage of France and the cause of her vast
preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people
and culture, might compel us at the sight thereof

176 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

to congratulate ourselves that this culture of ours,
which is so questionable, has hitherto had nothing
in common with the noble kernel of the character
of our people. All our hopes, on the contrary,
stretch out longingly towards the perception that
beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life
and educational convulsion there is concealed a
glorious, intrinsically healthy, primeval power,
which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals
in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again
in view of a future awakening. It is from this
abyss that the German Reformation came forth :
in the choral-hymn of which the future melody of
German music first resounded. So deep, courage
ous, and soul-breathing, so exuberantly good and
tender did this chorale of Luther sound, — as the
first Dionysian-luring call which breaks forth from
dense thickets at the approach of spring. To it
responded with emulative echo the solemnly
wanton procession of Dionysian revellers, to whom
we are indebeted for German music — and to whom
we shall be indebted for the re-birth of German
myth.

I know that I must now lead the sympathising
and attentive friend to an elevated position of
lonesome contemplation, where he will have but
few companions, and I call out encouragingly
to him that we must hold fast to our shining
guides, the Greeks. For the rectification of our
aesthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from
them the two divine figures, each of which sways
a separate realm of art, and concerning whose
mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 177

a notion through Greek tragedy. Through a
remarkable disruption of buth these primitive
artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed
to be necessarily brought about : with which
process a degeneration and a transmutation of the
Greek national character was strictly in keeping,
summoning us to earnest reflection as to how
closely and necessarily art and the people, myth
and custom, tragedy and the state, have coalesced
in their bases. The ruin of tragedy was at the
same time the ruin of myth. Until then the
Greeks had been involuntarily compelled immedi
ately to associate all experiences with their myths,
indeed they had to comprehend them only through
this association : whereby even the most immedi
ate present necessarily appeared to them sub specie
ceterni and in a certain sense as timeless. Into
this current of the timeless, however, the state
as well as art plunged in order to find repose
from the burden and eagerness of the moment.
And a people — for the rest, also a man — is worth
just as much only as its ability to impress on its
experiences the seal of eternity : for it is thus, as
it were, desecularised, and reveals its unconscious
inner conviction of the relativity of time and of
the true, that is, the metaphysical significance of
life. The contrary hapj>ens when a people begins
to comprehend itself historically and to demolish
the mythical bulwarks around it : with which there
is usually connected a marked secularisation, a
breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its
earlier existence, in all ethical consequences.
Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed
II

1/8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

above all the annihilation of myth: it was
necessary to annihilate these also to be able to
live detached from the native soil, unbridled in
the wilderness of thought, custom, and action.
Even in such circumstances this metaphysical
impulse still endeavours to create for itself a form
of apotheosis (weakened, no doubt) in the Socratism
of science urging to life : but on its lower stage
this same impulse led only to a feverish search,
which gradually merged into a pandemonium of
myths and superstitions accumulated from all
quarters : in the midst of which, nevertheless, the
Hellene sat with a yearning heart till he contrived,
as Graeculus, to mask his fever with Greek cheer
fulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself
completely with some gloomy Oriental superstition.
We have approached this condition in the most
striking manner since the reawakening of the
Alexandro - Roman antiquity in the fifteenth
century, after a long, not easily describable, inter
lude. On the heights there is the same ex
uberant love of knowledge, the same insatiate
happiness of the discoverer, the same stupendous
secularisation, and, together with these, a homeless
roving about, an eager intrusion at foreign tables,
a frivolous deification of the present or a dull
senseless estrangement, all sub sped sceculi, of the
present time : which same symptoms lead one to
infer the same defect at the heart of this culture,
the annihilation of myth. It seems hardly
possible to transplant a foreign myth with perman
ent success, without dreadfully injuring the tree
through this transplantation : which is perhaps

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 179

occasionally strong enough and sound enough to
eliminate the foreign element after a terrible
struggle ; but must ordinarily consume itself in
a languishing and stunted condition or in sickly
luxuriance. Our opinion of the pure and vigorous
kernel of the German being is such that we
venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimina
tion of forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we
deem it possible that the German spirit will reflect
anew on itself. Perhaps many a one will be of
opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle
with the elimination of the Romanic element : for
which it might recognise an external preparation
and encouragement in the victorious bravery and
bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the
inner constraint in the emulative zeal to be for
ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on this
path, of Luther as well as our great artists and
poets. But let him never think he can fight such
battles without his household gods, without his
mythical home, without a " restoration " of all
German things ! And if the German should look
timidly around for a guide to lead him back to
his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which
he knows no longer— let him but listen to the
delightfully luring call of the Dionysian bird,
which hovers above him, and would fain point
out to him the way thither.

24.

Among the peculiar artistic effects of musical
tragedy we had to emphasise an Apollonian
illusion, through which we are to be saved from

ISO THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

immediate oneness with the Dionysian music,
while our musical excitement is able to discharge
itself on an Apollonian domain and in an inter
posed visible middle world. It thereby seemed to
us that precisely through this discharge the middle
world of theatrical procedure, the drama generally,
became visible and intelligible from within in a
degree unattainable in the other forms of Apol
lonian art : so that here, where this art was as it
were winged and borne aloft by the spirit of
music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation
of its powers, and consequently in the fraternal
union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the
Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic
aims.

Of course, the Apollonian light-picture did not,
precisely with this inner illumination through
music, attain the peculiar effect of the weaker
grades of Apollonian art. What the epos and
the animated stone can do — constrain the con
templating eye to calm delight in the world of
the individuatio — could not be realised here, not
withstanding the greater animation and distinct
ness. We contemplated the drama and penetrated
with piercing glance into its inner agitated world
of motives — and yet it seemed as if only a sym
bolic picture passed before us, the profoundest
significance of which we almost believed we had
divined, and which we desired to put aside like a
curtain in order to behold the original behind it.
The greatest distinctness of the picture did not
suffice us : for it seemed to reveal as well as veil
something ; and while it seemed, with its symbolic

THE BIRTH OK TRAGEDY. l8l

revelation, to invite the rending of the veil for
the disclosure of the mysterious background, this
illumined all-conspicuousness itself enthralled the
eye and prevented it from penetrating more deeply
He who has not experienced this, — to have to
view, and at the same time to have a longing
beyond the viewing, — will hardly be able to con
ceive how clearly and definitely these two processes
coexist in the contemplation of tragic myth and
are felt to be conjoined ; while the truly aesthetic
spectators will confirm my assertion that among
the peculiar effects of tragedy this conjunction is
the most noteworthy. Now let this phenomenon
of the aesthetic spectator be transferred to an
analogous process in the tragic artist, and the
genesis of tragic myth will have been understood.
It shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the
full delight in appearance and contemplation, and
at the same time it denies this delight and finds
a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the
visible world of appearance. The substance of
tragic myth is first of all an epic event involving
the glorification of the fighting hero : but whence
originates the essentially enigmatical trait, that
the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most
painful victories, the most agonising contrasts of
motives, in short, the exemplification of the wisdom
of Silenus, or, aesthetically expressed, the Ugly
and Discordant, is always represented anew in such
countless forms with such predilection, and pre
cisely in the most youthful and exul>erant age of
a people, unless there is really a higher delight
experienced in all this ?

1 82 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

For the fact that things actually take such a
tragic course would least of all explain the origin
of a form of art ; provided that art is not merely
an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth
a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature,
placed alongside thereof for its conquest. Tragic
myth, in so far as it really belongs to art, also
fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical
purpose of art in general : What does it trans
figure, however, when it presents the phenomenal
world in the guise of the suffering hero ? Least
of all the " reality " of this phenomenal world, for
it says to us : " Look at this ! Look carefully !
It is your life ! It is the hour-hand of your clock
of existence ! "

And myth has displayed this life, in order
thereby to transfigure it to us? If not, how shall
we account for the aesthetic pleasure with which
we make even these representations pass before us ?
I am inquiring concerning the aesthetic pleasure,
and am well aware that many of these representa
tions may moreover occasionally create even a
moral delectation, say under the form of pity or
of a moral triumph. But he who would derive
the effect of the tragic exclusively from these
moral sources, as was usually the case far too long
in aesthetics, let him not think that he has done
anything for Art thereby ; for Art must above all
insist on purity in her domain. For the explanation
of tragic myth the very first requirement is that
the pleasure which characterises it must be sought
in the purely aesthetic sphere, without encroaching
on the domain of pity, fear, or the morally-sublime.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 183

How can the ugly and the discordant, the sub
stance of tragic myth, excite an aesthetic pleasure ?

Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a
daring bound into a metaphysics of Art. I repeat,
therefore, my former proposition, that it is only
as an^ .aesthetic phenomenon that existence and
the world appear justified : and in this sense it is
precisely the function of tragic myth to convince
us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an
artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness
of its joy, plays with itself. Hut this not easily
comprehensible proto-phenomenon of Dionysian
Art becomes, in a direct way, singularly intelligible,
and is immediately apprehended in the wonder
ful significance of jnusical dissonance : just as in
general it is music alone, placed in contrast to
the world, which can give us an idea as to what
is meant by the justification of the world as an
aesthetic phenomenon. The joy that the tragic
myth excites has the same origin as the joyful
sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian,
with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself, is
the common source of music and tragic myth.

Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the
musical relation of dissonance, the difficult problem
of tragic effect may have meanwhile been materi
ally facilitated ? For we now understand what it
means to wish to view tragedy and at the same
time to have a longing beyond the viewing : a frame
of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed
dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by
saying that we desire to hear and at the same time
have a longing beyond the hearing. That striving

1 84 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

for the infinite, the pinion-flapping of longing, ac
companying the highest delight in the clearly-
perceived reality, remind one that in both states we
have to recognise a Dionysian phenomenon, which
again and again reveals to us anew the playful up
building and demolishing of the world of individuals
as the efflux of a primitive delight, in like manner
as when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the
world-building power to a playing child which
places stones here and there and builds sandhills
only to overthrow them again.

Hence, in order to form a true estimate of the
Dionysian capacity of a people, it would seem that
"we must think not only of their music, but just as
much of their tragic myth, the second witness of
this capacity. Considering this most intimate
relationship between music and myth, we may now
in like manner suppose that a degeneration and
depravation of the one involves a deterioration of
the other : if it be true at all that the weakening
of the myth is generally expressive of a debilitation
of the Dionysian capacity. Concerning both, how
ever, a glance at the development of the German
genius should not leave us in any doubt ; in the
opera just as in the abstract character of our myth-
less existence, in an art sunk to pastime just as in
a life guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as
life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism had
revealed itself to us. Yet there have been indica
tions to console us that nevertheless in some inac
cessible abyss the German spirit still rests and
dreams, undestroyed, in glorious health, profundity,
and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 1 8$

slumber : from which abyss the Dionysian song
rises to us to let us know that this German knight
even still dreams his primitive Dionysian myth in
blissfully earnest visions. Let no one believe that
the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home
when it still understands so obviously the voices of
the birds which tell of that home. Some day it
will find itself awake in all the morning freshness
of a deep sleep : then it will slay the dragons,
destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken Briinn-
hilde — and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to
obstruct its course !

My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music,
ye know also what tragedy means to us. There
we have tragic myth, born anew from music, — and
in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and
forget what is most afflicting. What is most afflict
ing to all of us, however, is — the prolonged degrada
tion in which the German genius has lived estranged
from house and home in the service of malignant
dwarfs. Ye understand my allusion — as ye will
also, in conclusion, understand my hopes.

25.

Music and tragic myth are equally the expression
of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are
inseparable from each other. Both originate in
an ultra-Apollonian sphere of art ; both transfigure
a region in the delightful accords of which all dis
sonance, just like the terrible picture of the world,
dies charmingly away ; both play with the sting of
displeasure, trusting to their most potent magic ;

1 86 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

both justify thereby the existence even of the
" worst world." Here the Dipnysian, as compared
with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal
and original artistic force, which in general calls
into existence the entire world of phenomena : in
the midst of which a new transfiguring appearance
becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the ani
mated world of individuation. If we could conceive
an incarnation of dissonance — and what is man but
that? — then, to be able to live this dissonance would
require a glorious illusion which would spread a
veil of beauty over its peculiar nature. This is the
true function of Apollo as deity of art: in whose
name we comprise all the countless manifestations
of the fair realm of illusion, which each moment
render life in general worth living and make one
impatient for the experience of the next moment.

At the same time, just as much of this basis of
all existence — the Dionysian substratum of the
world — is allowed to enter into the consciousness
of human beings, as can be surmounted again by
the Apollonian transfiguring power, so that these
two art-impulses are constrained to develop their
powers in strictly mutual proportion, according to
the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian
powers rise with such vehemence as we experience
at present, there can be no doubt that, veiled in a
cloud, Apollo has already descended to us ; whose
grandest beautifying influences a coming genera
tion will perhaps behold.

That this effect is necessary, however, each one
would most surely perceive by intuition, if once he
found himself carried back — even in a dream — into

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 187

an Old-Hellenic existence. In walking under high
Ionic colonnades, looking upwards to a horizon
defined by clear and noble lines, with reflections of
his transfigured form by his side in shining marble,
and around him solemnly marching or quietly
moving men, with harmoniously sounding voices
and rhythmical pantomime, would he not in the
presence of this perpetual influx of beauty have to
raise his hand to Apollo and exclaim : " Blessed
race of Hellenes ! How great Dionysus must be
among you, when the Delian god deems such charm.s
necessary to cure you of your dithyrambic mad
ness ! " — To one in this frame of mind, however, an
aged Athenian, looking up to him with the sublime-
eye of yEschylus, might answer : " Say also this
thou curious stranger : what sufferings this people-
must have undergone, in order to be able to become
thus beautiful ! Hut now follow me to a tragic
play, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both
the deities 1 "

APPENDIX.

[Late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome uy
his sudden attack of insanity, Nietzsche wrote down a
few notes concerning his early work, the Ilirth of
Tragedy. These were printed in his sister's biography
(Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 102 flf.),
and are here translated as likely to be of interest to
readers of this remarkable work. They also appear in
the Ecce Homo.— TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]

"To be just to the Birth of Tragedy (1872), one
will have to forget some few things. It has
wrought effects, it even fascinated through that
wherein it was amiss — through its application to
Wagnerismt just as if this Wagnerism were symp
tomatic of a rise and going up. And just on that
account was the book an event in Wagner's life :
from thence and only from thence were great
hopes linked to the name of Wagner. Kven to
day people remind me, sometimes right in the
midst of a talk on Parsifal, that / and none other
have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of
the cultural value of this movement came to the top.
More than once have I found the book referred
to as ' the ^-birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit
of Music ' : one only had an ear for a new formula
of Wagners art, aim, task, — and failed to hear

190 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

withal what was at bottom valuable therein.
1 Hellenism and Pessimism ' had been a more
unequivocal title : namely, as a first lesson on the
way in which the Greeks got the better of pessi
mism, — on the means whereby they overcame it.
Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were no
pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as
he was mistaken in all other things. Considered
with some neutrality, the Birth of Tragedy appears
very unseasonable : one would not even dream
that it was begun amid the thunders of the battle
of Worth. I thought these problems through and
through before the walls of Metz in cold September
nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the
sick ; one might even believe the book to be fifty
years older. It is politically indifferent — un-
German one will say to-day, — it smells shockingly
Hegelian, in but a few formulae does it scent of
Schopenhauer's funereal perfume. An ' idea '-
the antithesis of ' Dionysian versus Apollonian '—
translated into metaphysics ; history itself as the
evolution of this ' idea ' ; the antithesis dissolved
into oneness in Tragedy ; through this optics
things that had never yet looked into one another's
face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and
comprehended through one another: for instance,
Opera and Revolution. The two decisive innova
tions of the book are, on the one hand, the com
prehension of the Dionysian phenomenon among
the Greeks (it gives the first psychology thereof,
it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art) ;
on the other, the comprehension of Socratism :
Socrates diagnosed for the first time as the tool

APPENDIX. I9T

of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent.
' Rationality ' against instinct ! ' Rationality ' at
any price as a dangerous, as a life-undermining
force ! Throughout the whole book a deep hostile
silence on Christianity : it is neither Apollonian
nor Dionysian ; it negatives all (esthetic values
(the only values recognised by the Birth of
Tragedy], it is in the widest sense nihilistic,
whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit
of affirmation is reached. Once or twice the
Christian priests are alluded to as a ' malignant
kind of dwarfs,' as ' subterraneans.' "

2.

" This beginning is singular beyond measure.
I had for my own inmost experience discovered
the only symbol and counterpart of history, — I had
just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful
phenomenon of the Dionysian. And again, through
my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given
a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the
trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would
run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyn
crasy : — to view morality itself as a symptom of
decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first
rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had
leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-
pate-gossip of optimism contra pessimism ! I
was the first to see the intrinsic antithesis : here,
the degenerating instinct which, with subterranean
vindictiveness, turns against life (Christianity, the
philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense
already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic

192 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of
highest affirmation, born of fullness and overfull-
ness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's
self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and
strange in existence itself. This final, cheerfullest,
exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not
only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, it
is that which is most rigorously confirmed and
upheld by truth and science. Naught that is, is
to be deducted, naught is dispensable ; the phases
of existence rejected by the Christians and other
nihilists are even of an infinitely higher order
in the hierarchy of values than that which the
instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst sanction.
To comprehend this courage is needed, and, as a
condition thereof, a surplus of strength : for pre
cisely in degree as courage dares to thrust forward,
precisely according to the measure of strength,
does one approach truth. Perception, the yea-
saying to reality, is as much a necessity to the
strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of
weakness, cowardly shrinking, and flight from
reality — the ' ideal.' . . . They are not free to
perceive : the decadents have need of the lie, — it is
one of their conditions of self-preservation. Whoso
not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but
also grasps his self in this word, requires no refu
tation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopen
hauer — he smells the putrefaction''

3-

" To what extent I had just thereby found the
concept ' tragic,' the definitive perception of the

Of

iy^t***** v u* '

* '<•/

Facsimile of NictzscJiSs handwriting.

,

APPENDIX. 193

psychology of tragedy, I have but lately stated
in the Twilight of the Idols, page 139 (ist edit.):
1 The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar
and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its
own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest
types, — that is what I called Dionysian, that is
what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of
the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror
and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion
by its vehement discharge (it was thus that
Aristotle misunderstood it) ; but, beyond terror
and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of
becoming, that delight which even involves in itself
the/0j of annihilating' * In this sense I have the
right to understand myself to be the first tragic
philosopher — that is, the utmost antithesis and
antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to
myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian
into the philosophic pathos : there lacks the tragic
wisdom, — I have sought in vain for an indication
thereof even among \hzgreat Greeks of philosophy,
the thinkers of the two centuries before Socrates.
A doubt still possessed me as touching Heraclitus,
in whose proximity I in general begin to feel
warmer and better than anywhere else. The
affirmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit
the decisive factor in a Dionysian philosophy, the
yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with
radical rejection even of the concept ' being', — that
I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking
hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of

* Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28.
N

194 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.

' eternal recurrence/ that is, of the unconditioned
and infinitely repeated cycle of all things — this
doctrine of Zarathustra's 'might after all have been
already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the
portico,^ which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental
conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof."

" In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In
fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my
hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us
cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my
assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and
man-vilification succeeds ! That new party of
life which will take in hand the greatest of all
tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something
higher, — add thereto the relentless annihilation of
all things degenerating and parasitic, will again
make possible on earth that too-much of life , from
which there also must needs grow again the
Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age : the
highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will
be born anew, when mankind have behind them the
consciousness of the hardest but most necessary
wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist
might still add that what I heard in my younger
years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to
do with Wagner ; that when I described Wagnerian
music I described what / had heard, that I had
instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the
new spirit which I bore within myself. . . ."

OTOO,

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

WHILE the translator flatters himself that this
version of Nietzsche's early work — having been
submitted to unsparingly scrutinising eyes — is
not altogether unworthy of the original, he begs
to state that he holds twentieth-century English
to be a rather unsatisfactory vehicle for philo
sophical thought. Accordingly, in conjunction with
his friend Dr. Ernest Lacy, he has prepared a
second, more unconventional translation, — in brief,
a translation which will enable one whose knowledge
of English extends to, say, the period of Elizabeth,
to appreciate Nietzsche in more forcible language,
because the language of a stronger age. It is
proposed to provide this second translation with
an appendix, containing many references to the
translated writings of Wagner and Schopenhauer ;
to the works of Pater, Browning, Burckhardt,
Rohde, and others, and a summmary and index.

For help in preparing the present translation,
the translator wishes to express his thanks to his
friends Dr. Ernest Lacy, Litt.D. ; Dr. James
Waddell Tupper, Ph.D.; Prof. Harry Max
Kerren ; Mr. James M'Kirdy, Pittsburg ; and Mr.
Thomas Common, Edinburgh.

WILLIAM AUGUST HAUSSMANN, A.B., Ph.D.

NIETZSCHE

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The birth of trapedy

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